Ryan Daniel Moran explains why most influencer marketing fails: one-off posts don't move product. What works is durable channels like email lists and Facebook groups where influencers make consistent endorsements. He walks through how Sheer Strength built an Ambassador program that rewarded users with exposure, turning them into repeat promoters.
Is anyone here successfully actively using influencers to market their products?
Where's Andy at?
So that's one data point.
Has anyone tried and failed?
The only reason why you care about having influencers is to move product. It's the only reason it matters. Otherwise you have a very expensive, worthless spokesperson. And I've gone both routes and spokespeople are worthless. Don't do it. So the only way that it makes sense at all is if you're getting this piece. So you're getting the audience piece. So you. You don't think like in 2018, most people are thinking of influencers as people with Instagram followings. It's going to be a very expensive ad with someone else's face on it. Don't waste your time. Where I care about getting movement from the modalities that are proven to create sales, like email lists, like Facebook groups, like regular consistent endorsement that moves product. Getting Instagrammers talk about your product is a wonderful way to spend a lot of time and money.
This is why you wow at the question of how many of you have tried and how many of you are actively using influencers. And no hands go up because most people are going after the social media impact and wondering why they're losing money. No one cares. They don't care. The influencer itself doesn't care. So their audience certainly isn't going to care. There's a difference between that and Tim Ferriss charging $36,000 per spot on a podcast because everyone knows that he only recommends things he actually uses. People want to be like Tim Ferriss.
I'm wearing a mizzen and main shirt because of the Tim Ferriss podcast. I'm usually wearing a mizzen and main shirt because of the Tim Ferriss podcast. Do you feel the difference now? Most of us want the easy button to go plug into that system. And that is the same easy button as unprofitable launches. You can do it. It's just going to be a horrible waste of time. Whereas the actual work comes from courting a few relationships. Someone who's become a friend and a mentor is Brian Lee of the Honest Company and Sam Prentice. Do you know Brian Lee's first company, LegalZoom, founded LegalZoom and he partnered with an influencer. Do you know who that influencer was? Rob Kardashian. Thank you.
At the time, it was the most famous attorney in the world. So he had pull. He had pr. They made him a partner because he was going to go do the PR circuit to move product.
Right? And Most people are looking at it like they're going to get a celebrity to talk about it, and that's going to move product. And it just doesn't. It just doesn't happen that way. The only reason you care is if there's movement in product, which is going to piggyback quite nicely when we talk about profitable launches. Yeah, it's dangerous to give away the equity. I want to keep that. So hold on. Let's attack that statement, because that comes up a lot.
Giving up equity is dangerous. If Mark Cuban calls you and wants equity in your company, do you take the call? Why?
There you go.
Equity is a means of exchange. Just like money, it's a representation of potential value. So it's not dangerous to give up equity any more than it is dangerous to spend money on stupid things. But spending money on wise things with ROI is very, very smart. Giving up equity to people who have grown the company, very smart. So, spoiler alert. What you'll see me personally do at Capitalism when we do a product launch coming.
That's one approach. The other approach is some sort of exclusive access group that they have to stay engaged in in order to continue on. So at Sheer Strength, what we had was the Ambassadors page. The Ambassadors group. This was. This crushed it. So fitness people want exposure.
I am just getting ready.
What are you doing while you're getting ready?
Researching your group.
Okay.
So what we did was.
Most fitness people go to the gym because they have some sort of a need for attention.
It's why most of us work out, because at some level, we're trying to impress some subset of the population. And in the fitness space, a lot of that comes from social media platforms. So what we did was we said, we'll highlight you on your social media platform.
If you have access to the Sheer Strength Ambassadors page. And we just ask that you use our products once in a while. So somebody would be showing off their gains. We would take the image, post it on our Instagram, tag them in it. They freak out happy because we just sent them. We just put them in front of 100,000 people. They got all this love and attention. Guess what? They're now incentivized to do a lot of take pictures of our product.
And what else does that do? It gives us all kinds of images that we can use.
So, Retta, you're loving this. Yeah, I'm kind of that guy, except I just take this selfie and keep to myself.
So now we've got 500 people that we can launch product to that are super engaged. They're incentivized to share us and talk about us. And anytime we need review support, anytime we launch a new product, they're the first to see it. They're the people that are going to talk about it on social media. We have a distribution platform out of the gate.
