Justin Levy00:02 — when you start to work on these partnerships, you have to go into it acknowledging that it's going to be a partnership and it has to be beneficial for both the brand and the creator, right? Not just to your point, giving them some beer money,
Benjamin Ard00:42 — Welcome back to another episode of content amplified today. I'm joined by Justin, Justin. Welcome to the show.
Justin Levy00:48 — Thank you for having me, looking forward to our conversation.
Benjamin Ard00:50 — Yeah, Justin, I'm excited. This is going to be fun. Honestly, this is an area of content that I'm excited to learn about. I think with artificial intelligence and everything going on, it's actually becoming more and more relevant as time goes on. So I'm excited to get your perspectives. But before we dive into that, let's let the audience get to know you. If you don't mind sharing a little bit about your background, work history, all that good stuff, that'll kind of set the stage for the conversation.
Justin Levy01:16 — Yeah, of course. So my name is Justin Levy. I come from about 20 years in social media and influencer marketing, building communities. I've worked at several Fortune 500 companies, as well as consulted with a number of companies ranging from startups to Fortune 50 organizations that are household name brands.
Those have included taking them from their initial social strategies all the way up to kind of building a very influential communities and stables of creators for them. And now I find myself as the director of social media, influencer marketing and community for a company called Nerdio.
Benjamin Ard01:58 — I love it. Justin, I love the background. I love everything you've done. And I love the experience working with influencers, working with creators. This kind of creator content is something, especially in B2B that a lot of people don't have figured out. They don't have systems or programs. We were talking before we clicked the record button about
your passion for going into situations and creating these programs and creating these new motions where they haven't existed before. It's a whole new avenue, a whole new channel and an experience for these companies. So I'm excited to dive in. So what we're going to really focus on is we're going to focus on how you can really work with the creator economy and also kind of the gap that sometimes occurs.
from using creator content. And a lot of the times it's awareness-based, but really figuring out how it's driving revenue and impacting the business. creator economy, influencer marketing, whatever you want to call it, it is growing rapidly. Like it is getting bigger, but what are people kind of getting wrong when they're looking at it and what they're focusing on today?
Justin Levy02:58 — Yes.
It's a great question. think that one of the things that we see consistently and you'll see repeated a lot, whether it's in LinkedIn posts or blog posts, articles online, is that brands think that they only can go work with these massive influencers, right? They might be, if you're a large company, they might be at the celebrity level, you know, those mega influencers, or they might just be
influencers that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers. And I think that companies get kind of two things wrong there. One, you see the over rotation to niche and nano influencers, right? So you'll see companies and you'll see so-called experts and stuff of that nature say, only work with these folks. Now, I do agree that the vast majority of the people that you work with are going to be niche, nano.
of smaller creators have a few thousand, maybe 10,000 or 20,000 followers. But kind of that second part where I think there's a miss is not to discount those folks that have 100, 200, 400,000 followers. Where it comes into account is what's their community like? What are their engagements? What is the quality of their content in their
their engagement, right? Because you can have someone that's amassed an audience of a few hundred thousand people. If their community's highly engaged in their content, they are still a good fit for your brand. If you can afford it and you can kind of bring together a partnership that makes sense for everyone involved, you can have people that have 10,000 followers and have no engagement. So like, it's not a one-to-one.
of don't use big influencer, use small influencer, like check a box. There's a kind of a lot more that goes into that formula to consider when you're starting to build out what your bench might look like.
Benjamin Ard05:01 — So when you're working with these groups, and I love this concept of, you don't need to just work with the superstars and the millions of followers, individuals, find people with good engaged communities. How are you actually partnering with these individuals to create unique value as opposed to just sponsoring some kind of reach through these individuals? I feel like there's a fundamental difference. How do you approach it to get different results?
Justin Levy05:26 — Yeah, I think
when you start to work on these partnerships, you have to go into it acknowledging that it's going to be a partnership and it has to be beneficial for both the brand and the creator, right? Not just to your point, giving them some beer money, you know, type of thing that
if you pay for a single post or say two posts or something like that, it can drive actual impact for the brand.
Brand might test a partnership that way, you know, and I'm in favor of that. A brand might say, hey, we haven't really spent money on influencer marketing yet, so we want to test a couple posts and we're going to do it with 30 or 40 people and then be able to decide who we're going to go deeper on with a true partnership. But what you see many companies go wrong with is to your point, like, hey,
So and so let me give you X amount of money and you go do a sponsored post from us. Cool. All that has done is maybe driven some awareness for your brand, your product, whatever your offering is, and given you the influencer some money to be able to go out to a nice dinner with your significant other, right? It's not a true exchange of value. When you go into deeper partnerships,
they'll all come with a set number of posts, right? You do want that creator to go out and speak about your brand. But what you should be looking at as a brand is are there other platforms that you can go deeper with them on, right? So do they have a LinkedIn presence, a TikTok presence, and maybe they have a really influential newsletter or podcast or YouTube channel? How can we stack that together to?
Build that out to really make sure and it's not just a repost of the content. How can we take advantage of that? With them you see other creators that have say Products that they launch, know, whether they are courses or ebooks Some that that I've worked with have Trainings, right? They might be sales trainers as well. So could you do something like you're gonna partner with them on the post and
things of that nature, but also do an internal training for 25 of your sales reps or 25 of your customers that you you'll have the sales team kind of select or nominate. And so not only is that beneficial to the brand and it's driving a lot of value to the brand, but it's also driving value to that creator because not only are they able to take advantage of multiple offerings that they provide,
but you don't know who's in the sales training example, you don't know who's gonna be in that audience that they will have an impact on that may help their business down the line as well as kind of ancillary benefit.
Benjamin Ard08:11 — Yeah, I love that. That's incredible. I love the difference that you have there of a true partnership versus just any other ad platform to get some eyeballs and some content. Now, how does this work for B2B versus B2C? I do think there's a lot of B2B marketers myself in the past who have been hesitant to partner with individuals to promote their brand.
because of the niche audience or because of the nature of what they're providing or the services or the software, whatever it may be. What is a B2B influencer program actually look like compared to B2C?
Justin Levy08:44 — Yeah, I think that earlier in the industry, kind of the nascent times of the industry, as it was kind of first grown up, you saw the on the B2C side, you saw it start with kind of really mommy bloggers and things of that nature, right? They would get free product. They would write about it. Highly influential blogs. That was the platform du jour at that point.
And as that has transcended and matured over the years, you still see that the most popular B2C platforms tend to be the visual platforms, right? So it's going to be TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, because they're platforms that enable someone to show off the product. Pinterest as well is really large right now because...
Take for example, foodie blogs, right? They can write about it. They rich imagery that can then be shared on Pinterest. We use them at my house all the time. There are, we have our favorite authors that we use because we started following them on Pinterest. And so when you compare that to B2B, one of the big differences is really platform. The type of content that they're communicating,
doesn't change. Maybe it's a product here on B2C, right? They're actually getting a product to test or review, or they are selling a product. On B2B, it might be an ebook, like a, you know, a gated ebook, or it might be trying to drive registrations to an event or something of that nature. But the underlying concept is the same.
Benjamin Ard10:11 — you
Justin Levy10:18 — It's just platform changes and the kind of nature of the piece of content that they're creating and the value they're driving.
Benjamin Ard10:26 — Yeah, I love that. That makes perfect sense. So I'm a company say, okay, this is a channel I want to explore or we need to do it better. We're already doing it. And I've found individuals who are not just mega stars, but I've found people in niches, high engagement, and I'm excited to do this. I kind of have this concept. I'm thinking about platform based off of where my audience is and where I'm at.
Justin Levy10:46 — Yeah.
Benjamin Ard10:46 — Now it comes to the element of I'm going to start working with these individuals. How do I track success and really tie that into revenue? And how does that kind of function? What's your playbook for that?
Justin Levy11:00 — Yeah. So right now, a lot of people and over the years have thought that influencers are simply awareness drivers, right? And across the kind of standard and typical metrics, impressions, reach, engagements, things of that nature, and in engagements that kind of wraps up comments, likes, shares, depend on the platform. But what we're seeing and
if you want your program to last, if you're on the brand side, is the need to show pipeline impact. And the smartest brands are doing that. And you can go kind of the initial way, and then there's a kind of deeper way that you can take that. the initial basic way is just use UTM trackers, right? Do it at an individual creator.
basis, not do it for the whole campaign or the whole program, but do it individually. So I have a unique UTM versus you and the other 38 people you're working with. Because then you're able to track that revenue on that single asset back to that single person. That does mean that your systems need to be set up properly, right? You can't...
blame it on the creator if your UTM isn't set up properly and your, you know, your mop system and your CRM aren't set up properly. That's not them. And I've seen that happen where they get blamed for the, the influencer gets blamed for not producing. And if you were to actually diagnose it, it's something on the brand side. But if you say all systems created equal and are up and functioning, then that's a very simple way.
The more in depth way is to do things like ensure that your sales team is aware of the content and the creators that you're working with and jump in the platform. Now jump into the comments and not be spammy about it. But if someone's like, I love that platform or I've always thought about, you know, buying that product. Why do you love it so much? You know, Mrs. Creator.
having your sales team there to respond in a human way, you know, not spam them, but, listen, I would love to talk to you. I can explain all the features and, you know, save her some time type thing. that's an easy, low cost way. as long as the sales team's aware of all the content that that's being produced and when it's going live. But you can even go one step deeper and go through their.
the engagements and there are platforms that will help you do this, but go through the engagements that are happening on those posts and utilize them as leads, right? So if you have a post that has a hundred engagements
Benjamin Ard13:41 — you
Justin Levy13:45 — on it, those are potential leads. That's a sponsored post and they're potential leads when it's, you know, there's again, all the marketing.
things that happen when scrubbed and do they hit certain scores and all of that fun stuff. But there's a miss there that a lot of companies have. You're paying this person, are potentially putting money behind their posts, they on LinkedIn as a boost to boost their posts and you're driving engagements and then you're not doing anything with them.
That sometimes has to be negotiated with the creator and that's fine. Sometimes that drives up costs or, you know, there's all those little intricacies in the contracts, but that's a missing element that I don't see a lot of companies doing today.
Benjamin Ard14:29 — I love that. I love that alignment. I love not just saying, go create content. We're going to actually boost and promote and engage and really get some momentum behind some of this, making sure everyone wins. Justin, we're almost out of time. These episodes go by super quick. Final kind of question here. You talked about the magic word of negotiation. So now that we know who we want to work with,
We know what we're looking at for success. know how to work together. What are typical negotiation strategies to make sure that both the brand and the influencer are taken care of in a good way. And if you don't mind sharing, and these can be general numbers, obviously don't share anything specific. If you can't, what are like benchmarks of amounts of money you're probably going to need to invest as you work with influencers.
Obviously there's a lot of variables, but what, does a business need to look at on that front?
Justin Levy15:22 — Yeah, so I think that when you're looking at contracts, some of the kind of levers that you'll be considering is timeframe, right? So one month, three months, six months, 12 months, that's going to affect the pricing and the amount, the percentage of discount that you may be able to negotiate, right? If the creator knows that they're going to be with a brand for six months, they're more likely to give a deeper discount than if it's
short-term revenue, think almost any business can understand that, right? If you're negotiating in a platform, it's the same thing. Multi-year deal gets you a better discount than a six-month deal if that platform offers that. Number of platforms involved. Again, if we're LinkedIn, TikTok, and Substack versus just LinkedIn, sometimes you'll see one of two things happen there.
Either there be more cost, but there'll be economies of scale, right? Great. We might value a thousand dollars a post on each platform, but because we're going to do three platforms and we're going to do two posts a month and so on, know, math carries on, we'll discount that by 20 % or whatever that might be. Image and likeness, typically kind of name image and likeness.
can typically drive up the cost for the brand. So will the brand be using that content on their own organic channels or through advertising? So one of the things you're seeing often now is a video that an influencer might create for the brand, the brand or post the brand has then taken it and
from one platform and promoting it on another. So say a video that that creator posted on their account on LinkedIn, the brand is taking that and then promoting it as their own on Instagram. The creator will usually charge substantially more for that because it's their NIO, right? So you'll see that go up. Sometimes you'll see minimum spends on boosted posts.
So the brand, the creator wants to know that you are going to put money behind their content. If you're not, that can drive up cost. So there's a lot of, and there's even more variables than that, but I think all of those, obviously your size of followers are gonna, you're gonna, if you're dealing with someone 250,000 followers, that's gonna be more expensive than someone with 5,000.
And as far as cost goes, it's, I know you said it's hard. One of the hardest things about this industry right now is that there's no baseline for, for anything. So if you can get it, that's what you get for your price. Right? Like, so if you value, and I've seen this, I've seen people with 10,000 followers get $2,500 a post.
and I see the same number of followers, let's even call it same engagement. Try to create all things equal, get $500 a post. Because one asked for a certain amount of money and then the other did. Because it's how much do you value yourself and your content? I've worked with people that for six months, we've paid $80,000. I've worked with people that we pay for similar size audiences for six months.
Benjamin Ard18:24 — Hmm.
Mm.
Justin Levy18:43 — $30,000 $40,000. So it is how in demand they are. Someone that we worked with takes on eight brand deals at a time for consumer for B2B. They are so in demand that that also affects their pricing. It's like they want to work with certain brands that help promote them in a certain way, but there's someone laying in wait behind you and...
Benjamin Ard18:58 — Mm.
Justin Levy19:05 — So if the math doesn't math, then they move on. That drives a cost.
Benjamin Ard19:10 — I love that. All right. I feel like we have a great introduction to everything when it comes to content, negotiation, tracking, measurement, all of that good stuff. Justin, this has been incredible. We might have to do a follow up episode sometime and get into some more details in some of these areas. I have a million different questions, but for the sake of our podcast, we like to leave these episodes short and sweet and to the point. Justin, for anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Justin Levy19:36 — Best place is LinkedIn. I'm Justin Levy on every platform though. So I can find me anywhere that most people hang out these days.
Benjamin Ard19:45 — I love it. Perfect. For everyone listening, regardless of what platform you're on, scroll down to the show notes. Justin's profile will be linked right there. Click on the button, connect with Justin. Say you came from the podcast, tell him hello. This is great. Justin, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. I really do appreciate it.
Justin Levy20:01 — Thank you.
