Influencer Marketing... The Right Way!

Hey there!

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Hope you’re having a productive week and are absolutely crushing your to-do list

In this week’s newsletter, we’re talking about influencer marketing - and how we’re going about it at Obvi

When we say “influencer marketing” … many of you will think about it in the traditional way of paying an influencer for a story or post and then moving on to the next.

But this is the old playbook.

The new playbook is far less transactional and performance driven and much more brand & relationship driven.

In this newsletter - we’ll show you how to go about influencer marketing in the NEW way!

… but before we do that - we have two things we want to share with you

We’re starting to get more active on Instagram - and we would appreciate any love you can give to our accounts.

In return - we’ll make sure to produce banger content for you

Follow Ronak HERE

Follow Ashvin HERE

Without further ado - let’s jump into it!

The Basics

At Obvi - we’re really, really bullish on influencer seeding

Influencer seeding is basically just the act of reaching out to influencers and creating meaningful relationships with them, by planting small seeds (read; products) that give immediate value to them.

In essence, it’s playing into the psychology of reciprocation at scale.

Like…

We’ll say “Hey - here’s some free product”

And we don’t expect them to do anything after that.

We don’t expect a post
We don’t expect a “thanks
We don’t expect anything

But…

Because, we are humans… and humans like to reciprocate value that was given to them - we often get…

A story…

A post…

A thank you…

… and that’s where the real money in influencer marketing is.

The goal of influencer seeding is NOT to get an immediate ROI, but rather to build their affinity with the brand and the product which pays long-term dividends.

In return - this does two things;

1). They start becoming a part of the brand and start posting without us even asking them to, just because they love the product SO much.

2). It creates authentic content because you don’t have to send them a script or anything of that sort. They just share what they feel.

And if you have a bunch of creators like that you’ll get A TON of organic sales and a ton of content that you can repurpose as ads.

The best example for this is Gordan Ramsay with Hexclad. 

After having a conversation with Jason Panzer (you can watch it here ;)) he mentioned that sometimes Gordon loves the brand SO much that he carries their pan on every show he does.

It just goes to show how important it is to build a long-term relationship with an influencer.

It’s definitely worth every single penny

Getting started

The way we do it at Obvi is pretty simple…

We have a team of 3 people who curate a list of influencers with over 100K followers on IG and TikTok (by using a tool called Saral) - as well as influencers who have worked with other brands in the supplement industry

Once we have a decent enough list size, we will reach out to those creators and offer them to send our products for FREE - with no strings attached.

Think of this as your paid Meta creative.

Out of all the people who see your ad, how many end up clicking and making a purchase?

A few percent, right?

But…

That being said - 8/10 times , they do end up posting something.

Why?

Again - because all humans are reciprocal. If you do something for someone without expecting anything in return, you’ll probably get something back in return.

And other times, they may not even post…

And that’s perfectly fine as well

Again think of it as a prospecting campaign.

The ones that do post show that they are genuinely excited about the product.

That’s when you start building meaningful relationships with them - again with “NO strings attached”.

The way we do this is by asking them what they thought about the product, give them suggestions on how to take it, and just overall - communicating with them

Now, once we have that relationship and trust built with the creator, we ask for a partnership and see how we could become a one-stop shop for health and wellness for them.

The best part is, we get influencers, who would otherwise charge an arm and a leg for a “sponsored post”,  for only our “COGS + Shipping”.

The creators who start making content/posts about us outweigh all the sunk costs of the creators who don’t.

So, it's a Win-Win for everyone.

Influencer outreach on steroids…

Now…

From the get-go, this entire process of reaching out to influencers and structuring deals may seem kind of laborious & dull.

Honestly - it did seem that way to me in the beginning as well.

But, actually - it’s pretty simple

We’re using this tool called Saral which basically automates this entire outreach process for us.

Instead of manually looking for influencers and seeing if they are a fit, Saral curates a list of influencers to reach out to and can bulk-send all of them at once.

Now of course - you’ll lose a level of personalization here.

But, as with many other outbound/outreach functions - you also need VOLUME in order for it to work.

This also saves our employees a lot of time because they’re able to focus on higher-leverage activities like building relationships with influencers once they start posting, or once we get replies.

Earlier, they used to get caught up with a lot of admin stuff like manually sending emails, and manually looking for influencers and didn’t quite have the bandwidth to focus on relationship building.

It’s definitely been worth the investment for us, as we’ve seen a 40% response rate on these emails out of which 60% end up being our partners.

Tool of the week

With most influencer softwares you usually need:

• One software for leads

• One software for affiliate commission

• One software for sending

… and as you probably can imagine - this can quickly turn into a big mess!

That’s why we use Saral for all our influencer marketing efforts…

Instead of spending hours and hours on:

1. Finding influencers

2. Filtering them to see if they’re a fit or not

3. Sending emails one at a time 

4. Following up with influencers

5. Tracking and managing influencers, payout, and posts

Now - we just have it all in one unified CRM system AND have automated the entire outreach process through drip-campaigns

Can definitely recommend you to check it out!

#ProudPartner

Thanks for reading along

As always, we appreciate you taking the time to read this. We hope we were able to provide some value to you and look forward to serving you again on Sunday

All the best,

Ron and Ash