Influencer Marketing Campaigns - How-To Run, Manage, and Track

- Cool, what's up everybody? Matt Simpson over here at Magnetic. Today we're gonna be talking about influencer marketing and specifically influencer campaigns and what we're seeing as an effective influencer campaign today in 2019. I'm really excited to have Brock Fuller on the line with us today.

He's our senior social media director, right, Brock?

- I guess--

- Jury's still out. (laughing ensues) Brock's been with us for a while now he works directly for our Colorado office, but he's actually located out in Tennessee, right?

- Yap, Nashville.

- Nashville, Tennessee.

- Right.

- Brock's been running influencer campaigns for a super long time and has just a wealth of knowledge, so I thought it'd be really cool to get a quick little recording today and let people know we're really specifically talking about influencer campaigns and how to track those campaigns. So we'll go through a whole bunch of reasons of why you should be tracking your influencer campaigns, how to track your influencer campaigns, and then also how to report on those campaigns, right through Google Analytics. So pretty much everything that we're doing today is a free tool for you to use any of your clients or yourself, you know, if you're a small business, medium business, you know, these tools are free, so they're things that you should have set up already.

So yeah, let's get into it. Brock, yeah, if you wanna just give us a little bit of background on yourself, and kind of what you're what you're doing these days at Magnetic, what your day-to-day looks like a little bit, we can just start there.

- Oh, yeah, so I'm originally from Franklin, Tennessee, went to school here in Nashville Belmont University studying entrepreneurship. Upon graduating, I started my own small business and like a local print shop here in Nashville, and grew that, and got to the point where, you know, orders are just flowing in just naturally through a network of folks, and decided know what, hey, like, how can I become better with my career and learn more? And so I started to dive in, you know, 'cause this is around the time with the huge social media push. So and as a small business owner, you learn really quickly how to manage social media especially when, you know, it's all hands on deck.

So, I did that for, well, continuing to do that, but for the last five years or so that's been a big focus of mine and recently, in 2018, got out of Magnetic helping with all things social media, I think, it's something that I'm passionate about only because it's our world. I mean, it's how my generation consumes, you know, just from marketing--

- Yeah news.

- Yeah news, everything so.

- Yap.

- It's something that I'm super passionate about, and I think so much it's tricky, because I think when it comes down to social media, and especially working with influencers it can be extremely overwhelming and even to the point now, where you even see businesses that are that offer, that their whole goal is offering a influencer platform for your business. And we can chat about that too in my thoughts on that part, but I think the biggest thing here is, is especially when working with influencers and diving in there is what are you looking for? What are your goals when it comes to your social media platform?

And what type of customer are you looking for? And what are your goals when it comes to the grander marketing plan?

- Right, what's the business outcome that you're looking for from this?

- [Brock]

Exactly.

- That's such a key element 'cause I think it's the easiest thing for brands, whether they're, again, big or small, to overlook, right? They get excited, they're like, "Oh, man, these people are excited about our product, "they wanna jump in, are tagging us, "it's gonna grow our following." And they kind of forget that there's a lot more to this than just how many followers you have on Instagram, or how many people are you know, liking your posts on Facebook. So there's a bunch to it.

I think if we just start with the general influencer outreach program, like how are you today? How are you reaching out to influencers and how do you see it most effective to manage influencers? And I think we can talk about this generally, for a little bit, I know we wanna get into one of our clients specifically, but right now, for companies out there that might be looking to get into influencer marketing, or companies that are in influencer marketing already, and looking to like hone back in they might feel like they, "Man, we've been doing this for a little bit now "and things just feel outta control.

"I know that people are doing something, "I definitely know that money is coming out of my pocket "to support these people, whether that's through "straight up cash incentives, or it's you know, "product-focused incentives or anything like that." Maybe you can just give us a quick overview of how do you generally reach out to influencers, and how do you see that working best as of today? And also, how do you see it working best to manage the influencers that brands might be using?

- Yeah, so I think we live again, we live in a world where especially on social media now influencers it seems like everyone is an influencer, and it seems that everyone is--

- [Matt]

Actually.

- Everyone is either pushing a product or talking about a product and honestly, that's it's kind of crazy how the world has changed in social media over the last few years 'cause it's done, it's gotten pretty heavy, and so--

- Thanks to Skinny Bunny Tea, right?

- Yeah, no, right. And so I have like a very unique approach when it comes to finding influencers and it's really through an eye test. I like to go through you know, multiple channels, and see 'cause there's so much, and this kinda goes back to what I'm talking about when hiring influencers, what are you looking for really? Like are you looking for reach for your brand?

Are you looking for content? Are you looking for, you know, likes and comments?

- Sales - Yeah, and most importantly, sales. Like I think that obviously, that's number one, but nowadays, like, my big push for influencers are you know, in it's an eye test, we go through, like, and think about your own business and think, okay, who do I wanna work with, who wants to be my representative of my brand, right?

- Custodian of your brand, yeah.

- Right, so think about that first, 'cause you want someone to be an advocate for what you're selling, again, 'cause so much in a world of where there're so many influencers, authenticity is, it needs to be at the top, you need to have someone that is going to represent the brand well, and it's gonna be a right fit, you want it to come across as authentic, not like--

- Basically.

- You are paying this person or you are throwing them product, right? Like it needs to come across as authentic as possible, and so when it comes to an eye test, you know, there are several platforms and apps that you can type in, someone's specific Instagram handle where you can see their follower count, you can see their current engagement rate, you can see like an estimated value of kind of what their platform looks like and what's good about these platforms is that they take current data. So it's like normally it's within the last 12 days or so of what their platform looks like. So, what

I like to look at is, what's your engagement rate, right? So let's check out that number, and if they have from 10,000 to 300K followers, I like look, I like to see around a four to 10% engagement rate. And while that can be great, while a 10% engagement rate can be great, it all depends on then this goes back to the eye test. Let's see what kind of content they're putting out.

Are they, read their comments, right? So go to their most recent photo and read their comments are there, are the people commenting on their photo? Is it, are they real comments? And I know that sounds so funny, but you know what I'm talking about when you go to someone's post and the comments don't even make sense to what's in the photo, and so--

- Fellas check out my page.

- Right, no, right, yeah, just exactly, you know, they're plugging something that's completely different. And so through this eye test, I'm pulling out red flags I'm pulling out, okay, interesting like, or do they make their own content? Are they relying on these clickbaity hashtags that are driving maybe these fake likes or fake comments. And so for example, if I do find someone that you know, passes the current eye test then it all comes down to, well, depending on how many followers and all that then it's reaching out to them.

And number one most important is developing a relationship with the influencer, because at the end of the day, like you want this person to be a brand advocate for your company.

- For sure.

- And the most important part is developing a true relationship with the person. And again, like for some of my clients, I'll follow, I'll find an influencer or a content creator that I enjoy their product, or maybe I just came across their platform, I'll follow 'em, and I'll turn their notifications on. So I know when they post, and I won't talk to 'em or engage with them for two, three months, I'll just watch and kind of see what they do. So then when it comes, then when I reach out to them officially either through, you know, a direct message or most of the time, they'll have like a business email that you can reach out of request, but it's great 'cause I can be like, hey, like, I've been following you now for X amount of months, and I love the content that you create, like truly.

You know, and when you come from that angle it's you already start off on a great foundation and--

- For sure.

- You're building a relationship which is so important, you know--

- These people aren't coming back and going, "Wow creeper!"

- No.

- "Following me for how long?"

- There's times when I'm like, dude, this is so kinda creepy but I always come with like the right intentions of like, you know, like, at the end of the day, I want whoever I'm gonna choose for my brand, and, you know, it needs to be right, and I guess if I come across as creepy, but really it's all good intention and--

- No, I'm messing with you.

- Business. No, totally.

- Yeah. Yeah, and so you're reaching out through direct message or if they have like a business email, like inquiries, please reach out to this email. You're doing that directly on behalf of the brand, are you doing that as Magnetic is it kind of back and forth?

- Yeah, it's back and forth totally. So for some of our brands, they've created a you know, a specific email that's my name with their you know, their company name and that's great, but most of the time, yeah, it's coming from Magnetic of hey, like, my name is Brock Fuller, we represent this brand, I have been following you, you know, I'll formally introduce myself that, you know, I run their social media influencer outreach and, you know, we've been following you for X amount of times and love the content you create, would love to chat about, you know, what a possible three month, six month engagement, you know, with you would look like, like let's hop on the phone, let's chat.

And again, like, going back to let's build the relationship, let's get on the phone, let's talk through, you know, what we're looking for and possibly, how can we help you, you know, you help us--

- It has to be a synonymous relationship, right? It has to be beneficial for them, beneficial for us, and I think, endemic, authentic, whatever word you wanna insert there, it just needs to be a real thing you know, you can't be running an influencer outreach program for let's say, an action sports brand, and the people have never actually performed an action sport, they just take super good pictures. But I think there's a couple things to touch on really quick before we segue into managing multiple influencers, and how you kind of go from how you can scale that, obviously, there's a lot of time that goes into it, there's a lot time that goes into making sure that the influencers that you have signed up on your program are actually doing and performing the way that you want them to.

But I wanted to touch on really quickly that's one version of outreach, there's another version of outreach where it's actually inreach, right? It's the influencers that are contacting you. We see that a lot more commonly these days, because like you mentioned, in the beginning, everyone seems to be an influencer these days so, or at least everyone thinks they are. You know, we manage a lot of different social accounts for our clients, and if you pop into the DMs of these brands I think at the point, there's like 15 people, 20 people in there that are like, "Hey, you know, I just moved apartments "and I need a new appliance for my new apartment, "like, what do you think about trading one "for an Instagram post?"

You go and look and you're like, you know, got 12 or 13 followers on there, and you're like, hey, you know, it looks like you've, I always like to be nice to those people and be cordial and say, it looks like you've got a little ways to go but appreciate the outreach, and. But how often or I guess, are you seeing that, and then we can segue into like, what's your day-to-day look like, for managing those things? Like I know that obviously, because I work with you, I know that we keep kind of a running list of people that aren't yet an influencer, but might be in the future, maybe potential influencers that we wanna work with, for a given brand, but our camp, our resources are kind of capped for this time, you know, we deal with a lot of seasonal products and service brands.

So maybe you can just jump into that really quickly.

- Yeah, no, totally. I think, honestly, I love seeing people talk about, you know, one of our brands through direct message, and again, like, I keep my tab, 'cause a lot of these guys will come through and maybe it's you have to, you have to click on the, you know, the one tab in your direct message that, you know, it's folks that have never been a part of the brand or something and they like, they put it into this like secret little folder in Instagram. And sometimes I'll go through there and you can tell like, if a message comes across like they've copied and pasted it for multiple brands, first thing I do click on their name, go to their followers, do they follow the brand, if they don't follow the brand then I get it out of here, 'cause, you know, at the end of the day, like if you're and I'm all about the hustle, like please, like, let's make something happen--

- However you can, yeah, you can reach out.

- If you're this passionate about the brand, and you wanna work for the brand then, you know, hey, that's amazing, but again like, so for direct messages, I love people, you know, 'cause at the end of the day, they're using your product, right? They are already talking about your product. So you know, and you can go in and you can kinda keep tabs on 'em and see how you know what, and maybe go to their profile and see what kind of content they create. And, you know, sometimes it's, you know, hit or miss but sometimes there's seriously an influencer that comes on your doorstep and it's the perfect fit, right?

Like, and the best thing about it is they're already a customer you don't have to, they already are into your brand identity.

- Yeah, that's like the best thing ever. So if you're an influencer out there, and you're looking to get brand sponsorships for your social media or the content that you're creating, make sure like the best thing that you can do if there's a brand that you really wanna work with, is actually create content for them and put that out there, tag them in it, and then start the conversation. We have one of our clients is a grill manufacturer, Nexgrill and we'll tag them in the notes here, but we run their social media account, and there's a particular guy who he has a full-time job, he's not like, he's not really like pushing for the whole influencer thing, he just really loves cooking, and he doesn't up until recently, he hasn't been using their actual grill, but he uses one of their accessories that's a cast iron skillet.

So the dude posts and he'll tag us like once a week in these just amazing images. I'll tag him in this too. I think his Instagram handle is on, Let It Burn or, I'll have to double check, but I'll tag him down in the show notes. But he just takes these amazing photos and he tags us in 'em.

I have a thread started with him on the client's behalf in the DMs, and it's just dope and he's trying to grow his following and he's just authentically just having fun with social media. But he hit us up recently, and he's like, hey, I'm just about to pass 1,000 followers and I wanted to do a giveaway. Do you think you guys could support me by just re-sharing the story that I put out there? And I'm like yeah, of course, like I'd be, we're happy to.

So that's one of those people where eventually I think it'd be cool to have him on as an influencer, but at the time being is that it's not really a paid partnership with this person. He's just literally a brand fan, and at some point, you know, if he continues what he's doing, putting out good content and providing value, you know, he puts up little recipes and things like that. So, I think if he just keeps doing that he's organically gonna grow his following and have this really cool group of people that are super interested in what he does, and that's a win-win for everybody, we'll support him, he'll support us.

But yeah, let's get into managing multiple influencers because I think that's a big topic.

- Totally.

- It can I know firsthand, obviously, that it can get out of hand really quickly, and I think when you start trying to manage like hey, we have you know, people that are influencers on Instagram, we have people that are influencers from like a web perspective. And, you know, people that are blogging for us, people that are you know, LinkedIn is a good one. We can probably stay more in the Instagram lane today but LinkedIn is a good one, like they're just going nuts right now--

- Oh, yeah, LinkedIn's great.

- Standpoint, so managing multiple influencers like how do you, what's your recipe or how are you going about this?

- The biggest key honestly, is being as organized as you can up front though. So on the back end of you know, what we use, which is primarily like Google, the Google Suite and Drive and you know, I have multiple folders of all my influencers. And then all of that kind of ties into you know, when you're creating your content calendar, especially 'cause, you know, we use Sprout Social, which is great and in that feature, you can pull up your calendar for the year, right? And so a lot of those times 'cause for some of my influencers, I have specific deliverables of hey, we need you to post you know, X amount of times a month or, you know, you're gonna be sending in four photos or how, whatever that looks like.

It's staying on top of all that is so key, because you know, at the end of the day, which is what we're talking about in this video is how do we measure? How do we track? How do we watch these influencers? How are they making us money?

How they making the brand money? How are we getting exposure? And they're answering all of those questions, and so really being as organized as possible up front and making sure you have everything you know labeled and files in their contracts and their deliverables in their Dropbox files, and everything all in one place. So you can just pull from it and keep moving, because.

And again, like for a lot of a lot of the influencers, we're doing three six month engagements. So, you start to build a routine and you start to understand--

- Short sprints at first.

- Yeah, right and again, like I even get to the point where all the emailing, you know, some of these influencers and even especially content creators, hey, like, we are 10 days away from, it's almost like an automatic email. Hey, we're 10 days away from, you know, our May or June deadline, like just giving you a heads up, and then boom, that triggers, "Oh, shoot, I need to upload my photos." Whatever it is, right?

- Yap.

- And this comes up to all levels. And from what I've learned, like the higher tier influencers, they already know, like they have their own system, and almost you're paying for the convenience and for the knowledge and that. So when you're working with these lower, you know, nano-influencers, the 10,000 followers or less, or even, honestly, even the 100K followers that range, like most of the time, they might not have it all together, right? So--

- You need more effort that comes with that, so I think that's, that's actually a really good segue also into our next topic. But, you know, I think that for businesses that are looking for actionable advice, you've talked a lot lately about like the micro, nano-influencers in comparison to the macro-influencers, and I think you kinda just hit the nail on the head with that is that if you're a business looking to get into influencer marketing, or looking to kinda regain some control of your influencer campaigns or your program, I think one of the things that you can do is look at how many influencers do you have, which ones are actually on top of their game and require less effort for you as a business or for your agency to manage, because there's a lot of like, time is money, and if you're having to spend a ton of time managing, you know, 50 different micro-influencers, that none of them are too organized, and you're always kind of chasing their tail out of like, hey, I still need that image or I still need that video, or we have your post schedule then now, I didn't get it, and so my whole content calendar needs to change.

I mean, I think that's a really good piece of advice for businesses out there and for other agencies that might be watching this too. But yeah, I think in terms of effectiveness, I guess, or the efficacy of an influencer campaign. What would you say is working better at the current moment is it the micro version, or is it the macro version? Is it a good healthy mix of both or is it just kind of dependent on the actual influencer and the content that they're putting out?

- Yeah, I think--

- [Matt]

That's kind of a loaded question, there's a lot to it.

- Yeah, no, no. Again it goes back to what are your goals, right? And what's your budget? And right now, what I'm seeing is that with a lot of the brands, micro-influencer is the move.

But then again, like, what is that micro-influencer giving you, right? And so say your businesses in Nashville, Tennessee, and you're a retail shop, right? And you wanna partner with a micro-influencer, that is in Nashville, or in the surrounding area, that has a Nashville following, right? And then also creates, and this is the biggest thing, they create incredible content themselves.

They're great on camera, they take excellent photos. You know, they're witty, they're fun. And then again, go to their comments, what are people talking about? What are they saying in their comments?

Are they saying, "Oh my gosh!" I'm just gonna say like, "Like, cute dress where did you get that from?" "Oh, it's at the store on 12th Avenue."

- You know--

- I mean, for the traffic?

- Yeah.

- It's not your goal then.

- Yeah, totally, and that's a, that like for me, and well, I guess a lot of our brand is, a lot of our brands that I'm currently developing these platforms for are their e-commerce. So that's where it gets so then let's go to that side of, you know, maybe they don't have a storefront they're strictly e-commerce, right? So let's take that, and then the biggest thing still is what kind of content do they create and what are you getting for your money? And most of the time like, I'm not, and I'm very particular about this, but it's hard to work with influencers that don't take, micro-influencers that don't take photos themselves, they rely on a friend, or a boyfriend, or someone else to take their photo, and they produce content themselves.

What I found through this process is that goes down a slippery slope, 'cause you never know what kind of content you're gonna get.

- Yeah, you're relying on third party.

- Having that expectation beforehand of like, okay, this guy or girl, they create their own content. It's all, you know, visually appealing, and you know, the same, and not the same, but like visually, they have their you know, their creative--

- Style down, yeah.

- That's huge, and again, when you start to work up to the macro level, you're then working with a whole whole other beast, and--

- Something that I'd love to dive into also, but I think, you know, I think we've gotta stop in about 10 or 15 minutes.

- Yeah, no, totally.

- Something that plays into this, and I think you're kind of alluding to that now, as you get into the macro-influencer level, and especially, like, there's kind of a medium ground, a middle ground there too. But something that we haven't touched on yet that's really important is that you set up the kind of the brand guidelines and the brand style guide and then you start looking for influencers that actually fit into that not only from a visual and visceral standpoint, but also from a personality standpoint, are these people, you know, personally aligned with the values and the, the brand that we're putting together?

So that's totally a different topic, I'd love to even get like, some of the strategies. Yeah, that can be a few episodes right there by itself, but definitely a huge topic. I think, as a business, and as a growing business when you're looking to really scale these efforts, and really make an impact long-term, it's massive that you have these things defined as a brand and have all of these values in kind of your, your core belief system, what we call--

- Well, if I piggy back off that real quick and one thing that I forgot to mention before is for a couple of my clients, one is CBD client, and CBD is obviously this blowing up.

- Blowing up, yeah.

- I wouldn't, when I'm reaching out to influencers, I'm sending them product immediately, like if I've been following 'em and I'm like, do I like these guys? I'm gonna reach out and I'm gonna say, hey, I wanna send you some product, try it out, and test it out, try it, and if it makes your life better then let's work together--

- Then let's do it, yap.

- (mumbles) Then please be honest with me and (mumbles) I don't even want to work with you, because I just know that, I know that if I force it it's gonna come across as you know--

- Forced, yap.

- And forced, okay. And that's the last thing especially in a industry like CBD where you know, you know, you want a high quality product and where guidelines and rules are very important, especially to the consumer but also you know, maintaining that reputable kind of brand, right? You want people that love your product that have been testing your product. That I think--

- Absolutely.

- To go off with that--

- And so that's good.

- For sure.

- Yeah, it's good, and let's roll with that client 'cause I think we need to get into some of the tracking so the CBD client that Brock's referencing is Koi CBD. We've been working with them for a while we're doing a big rebrand for their company and for their business and kind of starting to drive a little bit of separation. The client started as a vape company and then got into CBD so they've got a full suite of CBD products that are just blowing up right now and doing super well. Their vape line is doing really well, and they have CBD vape oil as well but their primary business is is two part really.

One of the part is e-commerce and then another part is brick and mortar through retail stores that they do own some of but the majority of those are privately owned CBD retailers so they're booming right now. Brock's just getting into influencer outreach program. We've been doing a bunch of things with kind of the macro style influencers. We've got some really fun people on the ambassador squad with them.

Brock, you can list more of 'em, but I know that like Christian Hosoi, pro skateboarder who I've followed since I was too young, just a legend in the skate world. I've been following him since I was probably eight years old.

- That's in the 20 (connection interference drowns out other sounds) of the Christ Air, he invented the Christ Air (laughs).

- Hirie is another one, right? Reggae artist.

- We've worked, sort of, sort of, yeah, sort of.

- You need to get back on the program.

- Yeah, I know, right?

- I would love, she's great. Like she--

- Yeah, she's (mumbles).

- She's blunt going back to like being authentic and genuine when it comes to social media, like let's, Hirie let's work, let's go, like let's figure something out (laughs).

- So the point being is that we've got a cool ambassador program that's running, Brock's working on more of more of an endemic and kind of a segmented influencer program. He's got a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of influencers in that he's working with and just kind of getting this campaign off the ground and running, but there's some in the yoga space, there's some of the cooking space. Obviously, with CBD, there's a whole bunch of different application use cases, and the market is starting to widen. So we're not just going after weed heads, we're going after, you know, the moms and the grandmothers.

My mom takes CBD for, to help with her arthritis and some joint pain. She's getting some super good use out of it, and so we've got these campaigns that are launching, and what we're really trying to get to today is how do we track these campaigns once these things are out there? You know, if an influencer throws a link to a product page in their Instagram, bio, how are we gonna you know, or uses it as a swipe up feature, how are we tracking the engagement that we're getting from that? How are we tracking with this client in particular, we're tracking sales, we can track engagement, and yes, that's a really good KPI to be delivering on and reporting on, but I think when it comes down to it, we're tracking sales.

That's how we can scale this is by going back to the client and saying, look, you spent this many dollars on influencer outreach and an influencer program, and this is how many dollars went back to the company in it. So, I wanna get into that. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here, and I've got, I've got a few things to share. So first off, I'm gonna close my calendar because we don't need that, but first off, I'll share like I said this is for Koi CBD, their Instagram handle is Koicbdife.

You can visit them on the web at koicbd.com. They've got a great product, 0% THC, they're highly regarded in the whole CBD world. So as you can see, as we just do a quick little scroll through their Instagram feed. There's a pretty big separation from kind of like what you would assume to be the CBD world.

This is going a lot more towards the healthy active lifestyle you see a lot of like fitness images in here, and fitness posts, and you know they've got a drink that they're making. Their balm is something that's working really well and kind of going into the whole cosmetic line. So this is their handle. And we've got a few different influencers that Brock's been working with as of recent.

This is a really cool one that's just about to go live. This girl (dog barks) calls herself the Yoga of Cooking and she just came up with a custom recipe that uses Koi CBD to make a Strawberry Tres Leches, which I believe is three milks, right? A three milk cake. It's all right?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. (dog barking) - Something like that. So she's got this post that's coming up, you can see that right up at the top, she mentions this post is sponsored by Koi CBD. You can see that she is linking to the website, if I click this, this is gonna go to from her website over to the Koi Natural Strawberry product, which is what she's using in her recipe.

I'm gonna go back to this really quick, but what we're really trying to get down to the heart of, and here's another sorry, Brock you're just need to scroll my thing over here so I can get to this tab. This girl Elizabeth Joy, this is one of the first blog posts on, to kind of kick off the influencer campaign, but this is obviously for health and fitness, right? Five tips for runners. She goes through this whole thing about stretching, self-care and injury prevention.

She uses the Koi Healing Balm for headaches, and some joint issues, but you can see she's got this great image here. This is doing really well. So when we want to get into tracking these campaigns, and also, as we talked about earlier, like how do we manage multiple influencers and how do we report on these multiple influencers? What we're trying to do is get to a point where we can go back to the client and say, look, Mr.

and Mrs. client, here's what happened here's the traffic that we drove to your website, and not only that, but here's how many people from these campaigns actually turned into paying customers. So, I'm gonna jump over to their into the Koi Instagram or analytics, Google Analytics account quickly, and just go in here. So if we go to, this is kind of like a rudimentary walk through their analytics profile, but if we go into their campaigns down here, which is what we're trying to get to, and go to All Campaigns.

I'm on a 30 day view for them right now, and you can see there's a bunch of different campaigns. We've got affiliate campaigns that we're running a whole bunch of email campaigns, but you'll see right here, the Influencer Outreach, this is something that we've set up as a specific campaign that we're using with our influencers. And when I click on this, you'll see that I've got one listing in that campaign currently. Like I said, this just launched just a couple days ago, but seeing some traction from it already and some sales, which is dope.

But you'll see that we have this listed out as Blog/Elizabeth Presta, who is the woman that wrote the, or sorry, that wrote the Five Running Tips blog post. So she sent some traffic to us. It's nothing huge yet, but I know that we've got a few different things that are running with her. Once we have multiple influencers that are activated within this program, what we'll be able to do is go to all campaigns jump into this influencer outreach campaign, and then be able to sort these by each of the different influencers, right?

The other thing that we'll be able to do here is we'll be able to look at from Elizabeth Presta, how much traffic and sales have been generated from her blog versus her Instagram profile. If she's more active on LinkedIn or more active on Facebook, then we're gonna sort these and be able to segment our analytics by each of the different platforms that she uses. So, what I wanna do is walk through the setup of this, the way that we're doing this again, this is in Google Analytics, and just down in the campaign's. This is kind of a rudimentary walkthrough, quickly just to keep it understandable for all audiences.

But the way that we're doing this is by using what's called a UTM Campaign URL. So there's a few different ways that you can build a UTM campaign. UTM stands for Urgent, what is it? Urgent Tracking Mechanism, I believe.

It's basically a way for Google Analytics to segment out where traffic comes from, and how that traffic is performing on your website. So there's a few tools, this is the Google Analytics tool, there are a few others, if you just search for UTM Campaign Builder, this is the GA Dev Tools version. This is one that we've used quite a bit from Effin Magazine, which is super dope that they built this. Super easy to use, and it also goes through some of the, some of the different purposes of each of the different versions.

But when you're generating--

(mumbles) Yeah. This is a great tool. So if you use this one from Effin, what you can do is drop in the website URL that you're trying to send traffic to. So we'll do, for instance, for any specific influencers, say, hey, you know, let's use that Strawberry Shortcake recipe for example.

Hey, we want you to write a recipe using the strawberry tincture that we have for Koi, here's the link to that page. So the link to that page would go right here, and that's actually going to the product page as we saw in the post there.

- Yap.

- So we drop that in first, that's a mandatory to build any UTM tracking code. And then there's three different things, especially in the you know, specifically in the influencer area that we're gonna go through on, and it's these three here, it's the UTM campaign name, the campaign medium, and the campaign source. So for whatever reason, these aren't necessarily in logical order, the first one that you're gonna be looking at is campaign name. So if we go back into analytics here and go back to all campaigns, the campaign name is what's gonna show up right here.

So the campaign name that we're using is Influencer Outreach. So I would take that, and I would even just do a quick little copy and paste here. Grab this, make sure that it's always the same, if you spell this differently, it is gonna show up as two different campaigns, which, you know, pretty much everyone figures out the hard way at some point. But you wanna make sure that that's spelled the right way.

I'm not certain whether or not capitalization matters here, but I would just copy and paste it just to be safe. Drop in your URL that you wanna send traffic to, and then you'll see the last two that we have to fill in are Source and Medium. So, if we go back to our Instagram, or our influencer outreach, and in Google Analytics here and look at this, you'll see this is segmented by source and medium. So the source here is blog, and the medium is Elizabeth Presta.

We might even wanna flip flop those because the source would be Elizabeth Presta, and then the medium would actually be like this is what traffic came from her blog from her Instagram handle, from her LinkedIn account, whatever she's posting on. But if you grab those two things, you grab her first name, drop that into the source here, and I will just go ahead and grab that so that we can see like a full example. So, if I grab Elizabeth Presta, and drop that into the Campaign Source, and then I'm gonna put Instagram in here, then I'm even gonna put Instagram Story. And then sorry, some of my controls up here are blocking my view of my tabs.

So let me grab this. And she's actually this one. So if I go here and grab the campaign link that I want her to be sending traffic to, this is gonna be the healing balm, you can see, let me put this in view, you can see that there's a super long URL that comes up here, but let's just say for instance, that we wanna send her traffic to this healing balm. Let me go back into my UTM builder, drop that link in the top.

And then Campaign Term and Campaign Content, these are optional, we usually use these in PPC. So when we're building out, you know, Google Pay Per Click, or Social Pay Per Click campaigns, the term and the content that we're actually promoting, sometimes email marketing as well, we'll use those a little bit more. In this version, we're just gonna stick with those top three, and I'm gonna click Build URL. So you'll see what you get out here is a link to the Healing Balm page.

And then after that, there's this question mark, and kind of a like a mild little code snippet. UTM Source equals, UTM Medium equals, UTM Campaign equals. So if I copy that, and then open up a new tab, and drop that in place and hit return, this is just gonna send me to the Koi Healing Balm page, right? So that's the destination that we end up because that's what we put into our UTM builder tool.

And then if I go back to analytics and click on Realtime, I know that they get a ton of traffic. So if I just look at the traffic sources, I should be able to see that there's this person coming through right here, from a medium of Instagram story, a source of Elizabeth Presta. Google Analytics is pushed out one day when you look at reporting, but we can see that, that UTM campaign builder URL that we put through is actually working here. So tomorrow when we go in and we drop into acquisition and into campaigns and look at all campaigns we'll be able to see that in this influencer outreach campaign here that we've actually got two different sources that are coming from.

Both of those are gonna be the source of Elizabeth Presta and then two different mediums that are coming from her. So it's a cool way, once we get into a space where we have 10, 20, 30 influencers activated for this client, that's gonna be a huge, huge time saver and reporting mechanism for Brock to go back to the client and say, look, you know, not only can I prove it to you that this is successful, and profitable for you, but I can also say, you know, for the next three months, we're gonna drop these few influencers because they're not performing, we're not seeing sales come through, the content isn't resonating with their audience.

We're not seeing the click through and the sale that comes through. So it's a really cool way to go in and track things. I think from this, you know, we do a couple different things when we go into reporting, we usually tie in with super metrics to export some of this data into a nice spreadsheet, that then kind of generates a nice clean report that's branded for the client, so it's easy for them to understand and kind of gives them the details that they're looking for particularly. But cool way to go about just you know, it's a simple thing, both of these tools are free, Google Analytics, if you're a business, this needs to be running on your website.

Regardless of you doing an influencer campaign or program or not, you should have Google Analytics running on your site. The UTM builders, there's a bunch of different free versions, we use this one from Effin Amazing. We also use the one that's straight up from GA Dev Tools, both of those will work perfectly. You can do a little bit more research on what each of the different parameters that you're dropping into the UTM link mean, and why you use those just so that you can sort things out a little bit quicker on your Google Analytics profile.

But I feel like that's a really actionable piece of advice for anyone that's looking to get into influencer marketing. And you know, specifically, if you have the goals of your influencer campaign are to do anything on your website, really cool way to go about tracking things. And I'm really excited to see that, you know, work and scale. And I'd love to even just do a little follow up in this post, once we have the full, the full campaign running and have all of our influencers activated in here.

- Yeah, I love that.

- The last thing I know Brock, you're running short on time, so I won't take up a whole bunch more of it, but one other thing that I wanted to go through really quick, this is another cool little trick that you can use this and sorry, but I keep moving my browser around. But if I look at this link that we have up here, if you see that on someone's Instagram profile, that thing is gonna look pretty damn scary. You know, obviously, for Koi's, we have koicbd.com, but if you tried to grab that whole big long URL, and drop that in as their profile link, whether it's the brand's link, or the influencers link, it looks scary, people see that and they immediately don't wanna click on it, because it just looks like some crazy web thing is going to happen, which isn't necessarily the case.

So one of the things that we use if I go back and just copy that link. One of the things that we use is a URL shortening tool called Bitly, there's a whole bunch of them out there, there's paid versions, there's free versions. But in Bitly, if I go in here, this is our Bitly account. And it's just a simple URL shortener.

But so if I go in here and look at our Bitly account, I can create a new bitlink, and paste a long URL in here, you can get a version of Bitly, that's branded. So for Magnetic we use a branded short URL of mag.cr for Magnetic Creative. I drop in this big long URL, and what it does is it comes back at me with this short URL, so mag.cr/2y9Rn9C

I can even edit that, so if I wanna customize that I could say let's just say strawberry, you know, for that strawberry shortcake, or I could say mag.cr/cake-recipe. And what happens when I save this? If I go up here and copy this link, this is now what I would prefer to send out to the influencers as like, hey, here's your custom Bitly link. That can go right in your Instagram profile.

If you're using it inside of a Story post, a Swipe Up post, it's a really good way to do things. You're using it as like a text link like this one, it's not as necessary, because people don't actually see the URL that you're sending them to, more often than not. But if I open up a new tab and just type, paste in that mag.cr/cake-recipe, and hit Enter, Bitly just does a quick little redirect and then goes to the URL that has that big, long, scary UTM parameter in it.

So really cool way to kind of like shelter your users from seeing this crazy thing. It's also a way to bring your brand back into focus when you go to you know, when we're dealing with 50 different influencers and they're all over the place on you know, Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook, it's a really good way to like bring in your brand back to focus with a simple little link, that's a lot less scary to click on so, yeah, that's kind of what we had for you for today. Hopefully you got some value out of that. I think whether you're a business or you're an influencer, there's a bunch of little nugs in there that you guys can take from.

If you have any questions for us, we're always open and always available. Obviously, we do this stuff all the time, so we love talking about it and love helping people out whether you're a client or not. So definitely if you've got any questions for us, I'm not exactly sure where all this video is gonna show up, I'm sure on YouTube and probably on our website, but if you have questions leave them in the comments wherever you're at. If you need to reach out to us you can do so on our Instagram handle which is @magn3tic, just change that E to a three.

I'll show you really quick so it's not as confusing. Again, it's just @magn3tic. Definitely give us a follow. Let us know what questions you have.

Brock, thanks so much for your time today, and yeah. Any quick sign off I know I've been running my mouth for a long time.

- No, you're good. No, I'm pumped, yeah, like just feel free to shoot out, this is what we're doing this is the fun stuff we get to do, so, and we love talking about it.

- Super good, Brock, thanks so much for your time. Thanks, everybody for tuning in, and we'll see you soon.

- Absolutely. Thank you, we'll see you guys.

- [Matt]

All right bye.