Turning Followers into Brand Ambassadors with Luke Yarnton

10 years ago the default approach to influencer marketing was I'm going to find the biggest influencer that kind of is in my segment or my sector and I'm going to get them to post about me once with some big splash Instagram post and then we're done and then I move on to the next one. Whereas now if you go down that follow account tree these micro influencers and nano influencers tend to be the ones who have that high level of trust and high level of credibility within their audiences so that's where a lot of brands are shifting toward the activation. This is right about now with Ryan Alfred a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cash and checks? Well it starts right about now. What's up guys welcome to write about now. We're always talking about how to get your business right today. This isn't about last year next year. This is about what works right about now. That's why we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics because it gets kicked around so much you see it. It's a buzz word but it is becoming the here the now and how brands marketers business people coaches whoever you are need to be thinking about leveraging. Influencer marketing to grow their business and to grow the awareness of whatever they're doing. That's why hey we go to the source Luke. He is one of the founders of the rave. What's up Luke? Hey how's it going excited to be here today Ryan? Me too man I selfishly. I was like you know we get asked we get a lot of requests and I was looking at your stuff and you know I'm I'm on a soapbox here recently with you know with Influencer marketing with internally and externally with my companies about how to leverage it and I'm like you know this will be an education course for me. I think I know most of it but I don't know it all and I think our audience can learn a lot from it. I know you're a firm believer in it right? Absolutely. It's a very quickly changing space at the moment as well. What it means to be an influencer and how to capture that and the ways to capture a changing it week by week and so I'm excited to dive deep on that with you today Ryan I think it's going to be a fun chat. Yeah man and let's start right there. I mean what has been the change you know I think you know I just call when you hear Influencer marketing it's like okay someone who has a big following is promoting a product or service and like that's it but that's not wrong but it's evolved into a lot more than that so why don't you kind of start down that path for us? Yeah I think a good place to start is if we look in the Revision Meritini as in the past and 10 years ago the default approach to Influencer marketing was I'm going to find the biggest influencer that kind of is in my segment or my sector and I'm going to get into post about me once with some big splash Instagram post and then we're done and then I move on to the next one and maybe they would have three or four influencers on their roster throughout the year super high touch and it's purely just they want to be associated with this person who has a big following because you can get a bunch of reach that's changed a lot now so it's changed for a bunch of reasons. One of the the key reasons that it's changing now is sort of this inverse relationship with trust in follow account now so as follow account increases trust decreases so a lot of that's probably being eroded away by the fact people realized that in 2015 people were just getting paid bucket loads of cash to post about some brand that they've never actually used or sort of experienced and people can see through that pretty clearly whereas now if you go down that follow account tree these micro influencers and nano influencers tend to be the ones who have that high level of trust and high level of credibility within their audiences so that's where a lot of brands are shifting towards that activation and rather than a one and done approach where it's I want this micro influencer and nano influencer to post about me just one time and then we'll move on to the next one it's more about creating this always on ambassador army where you've got a group of people who are really closely aligned with your brand ideally they're genuine users of the brand and they're trying to talk about you as much as possible it becomes part of their content and you build a really close relationship with that influencer which then gets sort of passed on through that connection with the really engaged audience yeah and the micro influencer here a lot though now we got the nano influencer yeah we got all I mean how many how many followers does the nano influencer have versus the micro influencer so at least for us and there's no scientific agreed consensus on how to classify them but we say nano is sort of we're saying between 2500 and 10,000 and then 10,000 to 50,000 is where we'd probably call that micro okay so there's the bands that we like to operate in but we like me personally and you'll see this come through throughout the chat today I'm a big fan of the nano and the micro I love that that's more into the influencer spectrum I think that's where a lot of the opportunity and the low hanging fruit is today and time and time again see so many of these businesses that we engage with burning hours and burning cash sort of chasing the Instagram DMs of these bigger influencers that end up in these campaigns that turn out to be absolute duds so and we'll lean into that that nano and micro into the scale today yeah I mean I'm out you know I'm I'm in the I got 200 something I guess I'm like you know that building for 15 years yeah years for the number one show like yeah I needed I needed to slow down I'm becoming irrelevant because my following is growing who knew yeah well it's a horses for horses approach right we're we're being there are still uses for these larger influencers in specific cases but it's not the only influences you'd care about have more than a hundred thousand followers anymore it's about finding the right fit for your brand for whatever you're trying to achieve with your influencer marketing well over time everything gets improved and you know like you learn like from the from the targeting and gets more targeted right so that mean that's what we're doing instead of painting with a wide brush or you know getting a I don't know a card actually and to talk about something that may or may not be that related and it's great to get to reach exactly what how much frequency are you getting and how much relevancy are you getting to the audience so that's what we're going for right exactly I can tell like a personal story here that sort of give some relevance to this as well and this is one of the origin stories of what we're doing what why why we're doing what we do now is that like through COVID time I tried my hand being an influencer my area of media was I was producing a bunch of slow motion coffee videos I'm not sure if you've seen them on your tiktok feed or in serum feed set to some music there'd be like a sexy espresso pulled into a cup we'd see the coffee coming out really relaxing I got like a couple of thousand followers on on my tiktok and was like pretty active on Reddit as well but in that time even with such a small influence I generated probably more than $10,000 with the transactions for the brands and the equipment that I was using because people would reach out and say oh my god what is that grinder it's such a cool grinder or that is a beautiful machine I want that machine and so I'd send them to the direction of where I bought it from but I didn't have enough followers that any brand would want to give me the time of day to have a conversation so I didn't get to monetize that in any way shape or form I didn't get any free shit I was just me plotting away with my iPhone 13 so pretty average content and now that's completely changed right where people would now take a little bit more notice about what I'm doing and try to activate that in a way that's beneficial to their brand have we lost the appreciation for amazingly produced high-end content because now you know everything's on the phone and everybody likes organic but like is there appetite still for influencers or people that produce content sharing like really well produced I think the question is not to the quality of the content the least the way I view it is is is it still authentic you can find really highly produced really authentic content and you can find low quality authentic content I think the reason people at least we're going through this wave at the moment of content shot on an iPhone and the way that their friends and family would produce it because this is how me as an audience I'm used to consuming media for my friends it feels a little bit more authentic and I feel a bit of connection but the style of content comes in waves right we'll see it change time and time again this authenticity that makes the exactly that makes sense so you paint that brush across it and that's probably back to like if it's just you know when you think of back to the I don't know what I think of is the cringey stuff is just okay the 21-year-old in a high polished Ferrari you know like video that's like it just screams I don't know inauthentic I think that's kind of what we're saying a little bit no that's an extreme example but I don't know I just I love it and like being a hunting creator and owning an agency and working on large brands in the past I love just high produced high-end content that storytelling you know obviously has a narrative and things like that and I'm like I hope we haven't lost the appreciation of that on some level I think it's a short-term hack is that like you see a lot of these bigger brands doing it now they want to be trusted and to that sort of tap into that authenticity and making it look like something that your friend might produce can at least for now give that illusion whether that's a long-term strategy or not we'll check back in 12 months from now and have a look at that how do I build an ambassador army you know like how do we how is this done excellent question so that that's something that I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to unpack and work out how to do it time and time again that's the main way that we at the rave help businesses unlock goals there's a couple of key steps to building an ambassador army and by ambassador army we mean a group of ambassadors that we'll talk about a brand that they love time and time again and ideally can have some positive outcome so typically what that means is let's find a bunch of these sort of micro creators or creators and influencers or even just everyday shoppers that have the ability to impact sales or whatever outcome you want whether that's clicks or transactions and do that consistently the way we typically work with brands is we break it down into three key steps so first of all you need to make sure you've got the right people coming in the top of the funnel and the way we do that or the easiest way we do that is that we've got a piece of technology that can go through a brand's email list or be actively monitoring your checkout and every single time we see a customer profile that we can match against an influencer profile so we've got access to about 15 million creator and influencer pro-prowser on the world as soon as we see an exact match we flagged that and we update the SCRM or update a notification channel for them saying hey this influencer here this guy Ryan he's got 250k followers he just purchased some socks maybe you want to reach out to him um so first things first let's go through all of the previous people have shopped and identify who has this outsized chance to be a great influencer and ambassador for your brand and I love that but I was because I often times there are certain things I look I'm a consumer like everybody else you know I have a big following we've had look we've been blessed have a good show you know loyal listeners and all that so we have influence and there's stuff that I buy like everybody else grocery store and all that and I don't go man I should be paid to buy this no but there are a handful of things that I buy then I'm like I should not be buying this because I'm not because I I earned it but I did build audience and have influence yeah this brand should be paying me to to buy this or buy it for me and then I should be promoting it because I'm a firm believer in it it's like right down their demo yeah so I I love that but I'm like man they we need more people discovering these things right exactly but you've touched on an interesting point there as well Ryan where it's like obviously we've talked about authenticity and trust that's also super valid from the creators perspective as well they want their audience to trust them and listen to what they have to say so they would much rather promote a brand that they genuinely love then have to like fame love for some brand that has been like hammering your Instagram DMs for a while so this is this is why we're saying the influences and ambassadors you should be looking to build into this army are people who already freaking know and love you don't go chasing these people who've never heard of your brand before that might be interested and might not so first we'll build the cohort of people that we think are a great fit for promoting your brand they're the ambassador army the next step and this is where a lot of people get stuck is the natural inclination is how do I get them to love me and join the ambassador army and participate always in forever and we'll be in love well let me ask a question because I'll let's because I think this is a key distinction back for step one what if I don't have that list what if I start up or early phase and we don't have a 20,000 person list to vet out those people in that case what I would recommend is let's monitor it in real time so every single time a transaction comes through will make sure that we're not missing a single opportunity of someone who might have a small influence to post about you and even the small community you do have simply putting an ask out there saying hey saw you made a purchase from us we're trying to build an ambassador army here's what's in it for you here's what's in it for us be transparent around sort of how it cuts both ways if there's any chance you're interested let me know opt-in there'll be some benefits do you help people if again it's great if monitoring sales but is your whole premise around just purely people that have already are buying or just bought is sort of you know building that army of those existing customers is there any amount of yours that's prospecting influencers whatever it might be yeah look we can help brands out with that that's a skill that we do have but we're eagerly what we're trying to do is is help people realize and where we're the best at what we do is helping people find the low-hanging fruit or the golden goose that lives within their their customer list I think that's where the most overlooked value is but if it does come to prospect your hidden super fans that also have influence exactly but look when it comes to prospecting an outreach let's say you're a business that has very few customers and no budget for influencer marketing the places I would start is spend a lot of time on reddit and find there'll be some voices in reddit that have a lot of reach tap into those people if they have some sort of expertise around your space jump into the hashtags and tech talk jump into the hashtags and in an Instagram and the folks you want will have less than 7500 followers because those are the ones who are going to get a likelihood of of some response from and they have that high engagement and you're not going to piss away hours and hours and hours trying to to get someone on board who's thinking I want to charge you five thousand dollars for a single post you want those young hungry creators that are willing to believe in what you're doing are those the ones who you want to be connecting with if you're early on the journey I love the the community thing and the power and I've been late to the game on this like I've known it like I think I've counseled people but like myself in I'm a I'm a practitioner like I mean I have teams and we do stuff the Facebook group reddit thing all that stuff is gold mine you know like you've got these conversation groups and things that are happening and even if they're not talking directly about your product they're having conversations about things topics in your area and like the next higher that I would probably make is it's like a growth manager but really it's almost like audience finding community manager audio our community finding if there's a balance of like because it's almost like this balance of managing what you have is kind of community manager yeah finding and nurturing and building and discovering community is kind of like the secret sauce fostering a community is is such an important part of longevity success now like you can see that once you've got a group of people who want to listen to what you have to say and want to engage with you that is a forever asset that you can tap into in a million different ways and it creates so much value and the other benefit is it's can sort of once you've got that critical mass it then can go on and grow itself and you don't actually have to be monitoring it and putting as much time and effort into it ideally you can get these sort of folks who exist within that community themselves the type of people who who can then go on and and and be the champions of the community out of love alone yes I love it I love it so talk to me okay we helped build with step one we helped them build their army either existing some prospecting but really mining what's there sure now what so the next step is we only want to get them to do one thing and that one thing varies brand to brand what you don't want to do is try and onboard them to be part of the ambassador army straight away that you get a lot of friction there you get a lot of drop off timing might not be right and then you burn a lot of opportunity so the key thing here is once you've got them to do one simple task view the likelihood of them doing a subsequent task is significantly higher so typically what we'll do I'll give you a real life example there's a athleisure brand we're working with called form they blew up a couple of years ago because Taylor Swift was seen wearing one of their sports bras they do posture correcting athleisure wear and they do it really well they're growing at a rapid pace so them what we do is we've got this automation set up plus we're doing the retrospective mining and we say hey so you may have purchased from us love your content um by the way if you just want to or like this is a really low lift ask if you just want to post a picture of you in anything from form on your Instagram story we'll refund your most recent order um it's it's not a big ask it's pretty easy we're not asking them to sell out no affiliate links no anything it's really just if you can post about our brand and just show that we're relevant that first ask and then we'll we'll keep our promise of giving you a refund that that's the first offer so that's a really easy offer for a creator of any size whether it's 2500 followers or 50,000 followers they're like yeah I was probably gonna post about this anyway now I'm gonna post about it a little bit quicker and I don't have to tag them or do anything like gross like that it's just showing that our this is a brand that I wear that I paid organically for brilliant but then what that also does is it builds a little bit of trust right so we've come to an agreement that you're gonna post about us and then we'll give you a refund the refund hits the account magic moment a little bit of delight and then following that so that's when we get to stage three which is now you've got a group of influencers or ambassadors creators that love the brand second point is they've actually done something for you once and then once they've done a single task few that's when they become part of this closed group of ambassador I mean that's when you can sort of foster that community every single time there's a new drop anytime there's something interesting happening they get updated they feel part of the brand and then all of a sudden through very little effort you've got a group of 200 odd micro creators consistently posting about this brand that they feel connected to for very little cost I love it the first step is always a bit early because you get them to do that one thing I mean it's low-ass like you said yeah then they're in and there's some connection and then you build from there I mean what's the percentage of like I don't know do you have data like the average that could if they do that one thing like that they but that they join the army so to speak yeah so it varies a lot segment to segment yeah certain brands that have more like social currency and by social currency I mean people want to naturally talk about it obviously they get higher cut through than something that's significantly less interesting so for every 10,000 shoppers we know that about 200 to 250 of them have more than 2500 followers and then obviously of those some of them are going to be duds it'll be like some auto garage that has a high following count or it'll be a dog account so let's say that the real amount is going to be 200 per 10,000 customers ideally we'll be able to to convince to join the group 30 to 50 of those as a good outcome they've got noisy inboxes it's hard but generally speaking if you can catch them with a good serendipitous message right person right time and all you need is for one of those to turn into a powerhouse for you to get really really incredible outcomes what industries is this work best for we're still relatively new on the journey at the moment we've got less than uh maybe just over 200 brands using the platform at the moment I need to check the numbers but it's still relatively no we're skewing more towards e-commerce at the moment so we're seeing a lot of proof coming out in the e-commerce space and we're dipping our toes into ticketing and we're dipping our toes into sass apps at the moment we haven't found a segment where it very clearly doesn't work what we are finding is that if the average age of the customer is above 40 the likelihood of us discovering an influencer is slightly lower but that specific customer base is significantly more receptive to these micro influence or nano influence of people so the impact is higher so it's a little bit more of a grind but once you do unlock those customers they provide a significantly better impact because the number of creators or influencers that people over the age of 40 are following is significantly lower than say someone in in the gen Z cohort who's going to be aware of 200 or 300 creators posting consistently whereas like my parents probably know of foreign influences it's interesting because you know I talk all the time about performance marketing versus brand marketing you know like the marketing that's driving us out today or as fast as possible at the bottom of the funnel versus building brand over time and you know we all need outcomes any business outcomes but you do you know believe it or not no matter what these performance marketers have tried to tell us you have to actually create awareness and intent before they buy which there is a funnel or a cycle that is still there it doesn't one add or one influence or whatever insert add like object doesn't always drive us to all that day yep and so I'm building to a question your Luke is I see this is beneficial both for the top and the bottom of the funnel so that's an interesting point I'm very often speaking to performance marketers when we're discussing our technology stack there is a performance element to this where often it is paired with affiliate based marketing we've got a fully fleshed out affiliate marketing tool and houses built around this idea that affiliate and influence marketing will be completely democratized within 10 years so I'm speaking often set opposite there'll be a brand market ahead of influence and a performance marketer when I'm having sort of these higher level discussions with a bigger brand and the performance marketers approach is what is the the right give and the get to make this work so when it comes to affiliate marketing for example they're consistently doing how much can we afford to give away as a discount for a referred shopper and how much can we give away as a commission to that affiliate creator or influencer for for making that and it's going to be a right balance right where for certain brands that discount that's attached to an affiliate link is a really effective lever to get people purchasing for other brands they'll rather have like a super low or even just zero percent discount but they'll heavily incentivize the affiliate or the influence of a posting level so they might go up to 30 percent commission and so the performance marketers thinking how do I optimize this how do we a BTS this and how do I make sure that we get as high a conversion rate or a referred shopper this a standard shopper that's arrived to the site on their own yeah and because I mean I mean ideally you know the outcomes for me would just be you know more trial of the show and if we're doing our job it translates to more subscribers yeah it's some percentage level but being able to track you know if we build the ambassador army for any given podcast then tracking the downloads that they drive for you know individual episodes and those are the sort of sales for this approach exactly look you can shoot them all that can be done they get their own unique link with a specific UTM you can see who's actually effective at driving traffic to your site and who's not yes the now I mean away honestly that's one of the biggest hands but found as well this is like a little secret that I'll share with the audience oh yes high secret for the show Luca like a lot of these at least at least what I've found so far a lot of these micro influences and sort of nano influences they are natively very competitive people they like to win they like to they're often very metric obsessed so if you can have a sneak a little bit of a leaderboard in there or some sort of competitive element to it that's a good way to get a squeeze a little more extra juice out of it let's say that I'll get a little bit more excited about it whoever can drive the most clicks to the site transparently to board by the end of the month you get a something that is is all of the appropriate value through the army that's what I need the now army and they're who's driving the most you know downloads or audience for the show and they get the winning badge that you know exactly I'll creatively come up with that we have merged everything else you know I'm gonna be cool like I will mark like yeah like they get one of those big wrestling belts that's set in front of you oh hey I can listen to them about just like this cost champion of the world the now the now army I like it see yeah you know I mean you got it but see I did say whenever someone overtakes me is the number one marketing and business show they can come get the belt now six five two six you might have to wrestle me for it but yeah the numbers back it up as I dropped my sponsor drink yeah but yes it's fun I'm liking it I'm liking it and we're brainstorming here selfishly but it applies to any business is the point you can use influencers community and again gamifying it a bit like people love that but it's it's also such a human thing to want to be a part of a community you want to be involved in something you want to be collaborative and co-create something with you appears if you just provide that structure for them and provide a little bit of incentive to get them moving it is just something native to human nature that people want to be a part of something yes influencer marketing is like it's the now version of you know spokesperson you know like back in the day and even now it brands you spokespersons I mean if you watch the Super Bowl every ad has a celebrity in it and you had spokesperson marketing so you have Michael Jordan or you have Michael Phelps if you're a swimmer like whatever it might be Olympian actor Tom Cruise and then the spokesperson for the brand influencer marketing is like the evolution of that on some level but then it's the more authentic version because it's everyday people right absolutely yeah look I think at least when I was in in college and you learn a little about marketing there was always that saying that they keep bringing out which is your brand is what they say about you when you're not in the room I think that's Jeff Bezos quote and I think brands are starting to realize that go on of the days where they have absolute control of what people are saying about the brand and they can put words in Michael Jordan's mouth to assert who they are as a brand it's changed now and that the amount of media and their access to media has been a complete paradigm chef from when that spokesperson style of marketing was proper and present so now people are talking about your brand whether you like it or not but the key now is not to control what people are saying about it as a brand you just need to make sure your product is solid and does what it says on the box and then what you do is try and make people talk about it as much as possible you just want to be top of mind you want to be the brand that's getting discussed and if you've built the right product and you can facilitate getting people talking about it at scale that's how you win in 2025 I think that's well said Luke as we close out here where you see the company evolving to anything on the horizon you know we're talking about what's working now where this whole influencer market yeah craze is going and all those things and then some of the call is the action of where to find you guys yeah so I think where we see the or at least the direction to which we're building is that I'm a firm believer that affiliate marketing and influencer marketing is going to be completely democratized and decentralized within the next 10 years and by that I mean gone are the days of brands picking influencers who are going to represent them and instead the opportunity should be available for anyone who wants to motor brand to be able to participate in the rewards that that go alongside that so that's why we're building in this space here we're building a tool that can analyze influencers in real time and be a really really simple tool that will allow any single customer whether they have a following or not to refer a friend family follower and get a Venma reward or a PayPal reward for doing so in a way that's completely seamless so we believe that gone are the days of traditional influencer and affiliate marketing and in a world where searches changing advertising on on method and traditional platforms are becoming more difficult we see no reason that relying on customers who know and love your brands that should be a very meaningful growth channel for every brand going forward and I think that's a smart place for brands to start investing their time and energy so that's the direction we're building and we're going to keep going that direction foot to the floor and continue to unlock a bunch of benefit for the brands that we like to work with if you're interested obviously you can find me the rave.co find me on unlinked in lukeianton y-a-r-n-t-o-n like a ton of yarn and maybe in the show notes here yes we will have it of course in the show notes it's fascinating think as you were talking about it you know removing sort of the boundaries and the stages of analysis but the democratization and just it's almost like we're making purchases every day and allowing and empowering consumers to sort of get just commission immediately from the word of mouth the you know that they that they're naturally doing anyway exactly unlocking that in a very easy way because even now the affiliate stuff I don't do many affiliate deals like with our sponsors because it's just a pain to ask to keep up with yeah and like all this stuff and I'm like just look I don't have a low fee leveraged audience if I believe in the product but if if we can bring down sort of the uh I don't know the walls that are the complexities the more this really takes off exactly look I think the key is making it seamless making it easy making it transparent and I think this is the way that you can engage people at scale removing friction from influencer marketing and everything else in this whole realm luke it's been a pleasure having you on the show I really appreciate it Ryan this has been super fun this is a it's been a blast even even got to some real-life brain storming mid show which is uh I know I'd like to pick your brains more on that uh a little follow-up hey guys you notified me Ryan is right.com will find all the highlight clips the full episode and the links to the rave everything that all Luke's personal profiles all that will be in the show notes and on the website you are to find us on Instagram right about now show it's got that blue check yeah Ryan offered on Instagram shoot me a DM we're building that now army we'll see you next time all right about now this has been right about now with Ryan Alfred a Radcast network production visit Ryan is right.com for full audio and video versions of the show order one choir about sponsorship opportunities thanks for listening finding great candidates to hire can be like well trying to find a needle in a haystack sure you can post your job to some job board but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along which is why you should try zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip zippercruder doesn't depend on candidates finding you it finds them for you it's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job you get qualified candidates fast so while other companies might deliver a lot of hey zippercruder finds you what you're looking for the needle in the haystack see why four out of five employers who post a job on zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day zippercruder the smartest way to hire and right now you can try zippercruder for free that's right free at zippercruder.com slash zip that zippercruder.com slash zip zippercruder.com slash zip