Chelsea Clark00:02 — If you actually hire an influencer to do like an off the cuff, super, you know, non-rehearsed, have no idea what they're talking about, not even say your brand name correctly, quite frankly, right? That seems so authentic. Like this thing, I'm not sure how to pronounce this brand, but whatever this is, I love it. Like look what it's done to my hair.
That stuff sells, right? And that's not what a brand would ever approve.
Benjamin Ard00:46 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Chelsea. Chelsea, welcome to the show.
Chelsea Clark00:51 — Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Benjamin Ard00:53 — Yeah, Chelsea, I'm excited. This is a subject we haven't talked a ton about. I think it's going to be a ton of fun. I think the audience is going to love it. But before we dive in, let's get to know you, your background, work history, all that kind of fun stuff so the audience knows who Chelsea is.
Chelsea Clark01:07 — Mm-hmm. Right, so for the past six years, I've run a company called Momfluence, and as the name suggests, we work with mom influencers. And in the very beginning, we were working primarily on a social posting basis, right? Like back then, UGC definitely wasn't a paid gig for many creators, and so now we've kind of moved to calling the people we work with creators because a lot of the work we do is just for content, right? It's less about social posting because it's gotten so expensive. So, you know, in a nutshell, we work with any company that sells anything that a woman has any influence over, which apparently according to data is 80% of things. And I always joke that it's like 99.89% in my house, right? Like we have an opinion on everything and we like to research and we like to talk to our friends about what they like. So we're pretty influential as a demographic and yeah, I've worked with, you know, tire companies, mortgage brokers, services, like really there's, it's not all just baby stuff, which is what a lot of people assume.
My background is actually not marketing per se, but I used to own a restaurant chain. so, I mean, you have to do a lot of marketing because it's a rough business. But I got into this because I was helping other small businesses with their influencer marketing and realized there was no, you know, cost effective, accessible, you know, platform or agency that had just moms, right? I did use a few platforms and I would look through like travel creators and lots of people without kids and lots of men and no offense, but that wasn't what I needed for what I was doing. So I had the crazy idea to build Momfluence and it's been awesome. I think we've worked with over 500 brands now, like 10,000-ish creators. I probably need to update those stats, but it's been a pretty successful business from the beginning and I think that speaks to the creator economy growing exponentially, of course, and just the moms being so influential.
Benjamin Ard02:53 — I love that. That's awesome. I also love how everyone in entrepreneurship finds their way in some unique way. Like you found this pathway through restaurant ownership and then also the marketing side through restaurant ownership. It's kind of fun. Like this is why I like this space. Everyone's got a different story to tell. Their origins are all different, but it's what makes the space fun. It makes it really cohesive and allows people to kind of get to know each other and have the variety of where everyone came from and their experience. And it's a ton of fun. I love that.
Chelsea Clark03:22 — Mm-hmm.
Benjamin Ard03:22 — So Chelsea, what we agreed to talk about today that I'm excited for our audience to hear about is lifestyle content for brand ads. So when we dive into this, the first question, where do lifestyle brand ads most often fall apart? Maybe we break it down a little bit. Can you define really quickly what lifestyle brand ads are? And then maybe let's talk about where people kind of screw them up a little bit. Sometimes it's kind of fun to talk on that front to kick things.
Chelsea Clark03:45 — Yeah, and I mean, this is a big category of issue, because it is, it's a really, you know, more and more over the six years that I've been doing this, more brands want content that they can just amplify, right? TikToks, like Spark ads, on Meta, I mean, even in newsletters, really content is the more preferred deliverable that they get because they know that social posting campaigns traditionally don't work once, where a great piece of content can, right? It could have a long lifespan. So for me, lifestyle ads are just any ad that is made by a human that could be creator-made primarily, right? It's not like a graphic or AI created, although we do get some questions about that.
But most brands we work with are in the lifestyle space. They sell something you can use inside your house or on your skincare, and it definitely has, I would say that most industry, most niches really do need to run ads. There's very few products that you can just get an influencer to post and it will sell. And those things would be Amazon clothes and really like fast fashion inexpensive things — that stuff sells through influencers, right? It's an impulse purchase. You don't need to think much about it. Anything beyond that, which is most of what is sold, it really does need ads for retargeting and all those things. And I think, you know, historically the problem really has been that brands are hiring influencers to make ads. Those are not the same thing. Influencers are actually terrible at making ads.
Right, they've grown their account. Let's say you hire someone with 100K. They're used to speaking very off the cuff and not really polishing their content. And maybe for them, which is what I see often, the lowest investment in their content can perform the best. Right, because it seems so natural and authentic. It's not polished in any way. Well, no brand wants that. They'll look at that as basically garbage content that their seniors would never approve.
It's like, what — we paid what for that? So not only is expensive from an influencer, but it's not going to be, there's no talking points. They didn't follow a brief, which in a lot of ways actually is the ideal content, but it just never gets passed. The content approval process stops at the first round. And they're like, no, no, no. You didn't mention the seven things in the brief, and it wasn't all these specific things.
It starts with hiring the wrong people basically. And then, but then also it actually starts with a misaligned opinion on what you should be getting, right?
Benjamin Ard05:52 — Yeah.
Chelsea Clark05:58 — If you actually hire an influencer to do like an off the cuff, super, you know, non-rehearsed, have no idea what they're talking about, might not even say your brand name correctly, quite frankly, right? That seems so authentic. Like this thing, I'm not sure how to pronounce this brand, but whatever this is, I love it. Like look what it's done to my hair.
That stuff sells, right? And that's not what a brand would ever approve.
Benjamin Ard06:19 — So, and I love this frame of mind and I love the word authenticity because I think more and more people on the consuming side of things care and look for authenticity. They're really jaded from the overly polished says all of the bullet point perfect kind of idea because it's unrelatable. You know, none of that's real kind of an idea. How internally as a company can we kind of accept this new kind of content that actually pushes the brand forward as opposed to being extra safe and only doing the brand approved traditional, highly professional photo shoot. Like how do you work with these companies say, hey, no, the authenticity is what you're getting. And this is good. How do you help transition the mindsets in some of those conversations?
Chelsea Clark07:00 — Yeah. I mean, in a lot of ways, the people that we deal with are junior marketing managers, maybe even senior, and they're reporting to someone else that never speaks to us. So the truth is, a lot of times we have no influence. And we push back on certain content, like they'll say, please have a refilm with X, Y, and Z. And we're like, OK, but that might not seem authentic. I mean, back in the day, I was convincing brands not to include a URL in the Instagram caption. So I was like, you're going to look stupid. We're not doing that. So there's certain things we can be really adamant about.
At the end of the day, I think a lot of the C-suite still quite frankly don't use social media that much, right? Even the people sometimes we interact with have no idea what a story is versus in feed. And so I think until those positions change to be younger people that are on social media more, will they understand what works for them? You know, so this right answer is we don't have a ton of say and really it's up to the brand to have a more progressive idea on it. I mean, lots of times the way we tried that is to find other content that it looks good enough and say like, hey, we could get something like this made. Are you open to this? And a lot of times the pushback then is like, yeah, sure. As long as she mentions that we're, you know, EWG certified, all these inauthentic things that would never say. And even in our briefs, the one line we have over and over is you need to speak as if you're speaking to a friend. But that's actually not what a lot of brands want, which is really funny.
Benjamin Ard08:22 — I love that. So OK, so you're doing your best to have people on board. And when they're on board with the authenticity, they're on board with the idea of let's work with creators, these influencers. You talked about the magic word, the brief. How are you helping these businesses communicate what they need and want to the creators in a way that you said they're authentic, they're original, they're talking to a friend, but it's also serving the purposes of the business. How do you kind of structure and communicate that back and forth?
Chelsea Clark08:50 — Yeah, interestingly, it's just auto copy. We have a brief builder on our platform and there's auto copy that they can overwrite and change, but it's basically like what we think our best practices are, which includes like speak to your audience like you're speaking to a friend. Don't use overly technical language. But again, ultimately, it's just back to normal advertising where people sit in a room for 20 — not 20 minutes, hours — talking about what shirt the guy should be wearing in the commercial. At the end of the day, the brand has some guideline that no matter what the creative people think will be amazing, it never gets passed. It's really the same thing.
You know, except for now the people trying to, the creatives are the influencer being like, I have this idea, we could do this. And the brand's like, nah, let's just stick to what we've done before. You know, so I don't think, I honestly don't think it will change until it's just new leadership that's a bit, sways a bit younger. Yeah.
Benjamin Ard09:35 — That's fair. That's fair. So as you're engaging with these different groups, these influencers and creators, obviously they're going to come up with new and creative ideas that you may have never explored before. How do you measure success? You know, everyone in marketing and businesses is like, great, I want to show a dollar in, dollar out kind of conversion. But you even talked about the idea of not throwing in a URL that's got all the UTMs and this and that. How do you recommend brands actually measure and look at success to know if something's working, if a new direction is working, which creators they should continue to work with, or ultimately which relationships they should end and invest elsewhere?
Chelsea Clark10:12 — Yeah, I attended a webinar a couple weeks ago that said, and I don't know how you can believe it or not believe it, but that 80% of revenue is not tracked through any type of influencer software, right? Because it's true, I'm one of those examples. I will probably Google something after I see it versus going through the links. So I think that really, a lot of brands still come into influencer campaigns with this idea of getting ROI, which of course is amazing, but there has to be years of brand building before that.
And so there's lots of brands that do see that, or again, back to my original idea of things that sell on impulse, that are cheap and accessible, easy to buy. Anything on Amazon, fast fashion, you can sell tons of those. But I think, you know, I always try to convince any brand that I have a sales call with that this is an awareness campaign and you are paying for views right now. Like that is your, and content, right? Almost all of our campaigns, they get all the content to repurpose any way they want.
Benjamin Ard10:52 — Mm-hmm.
Chelsea Clark11:06 — So even just from that, you're almost at a wash cost-wise. And any sales beyond that is a benefit for a while, like six months, 12 months. And you should never just be running influencer social campaigns. You should be retargeting the same audiences using the content elsewhere. It's just one very small piece. Lots of brands still do think influencers are magicians. We repurpose this content all the time that influencers aren't magicians.
You know, it's just, it's not going to work unless you've spent a lot of time building, right? Spanx can sell on one post. Nix can, there's lots of companies can, but they've spent a lot of money building that fan base basically. And so the idea, or if you're solving like a really crucial problem, right? That's the, you know, but yeah, I think that selling a campaign on an awareness play and to get content, like that's a two for one. That's pretty strong. Getting diverse content that's shot in different locations, different ethnicities, different languages, right? We're doing a campaign now where they are operable in all the other states and so they want Spanish content. Well, like at the end of that to get 60 pieces of content and all those creators posting, like as a cohesive campaign that's pretty strong, but you know, that's just the beginning for like a startup. So, yeah.
Benjamin Ard12:10 — I love that. So I've always had this idea — well, not always, but in the last couple of years, I do think that we spend a lot of time and effort into measuring the ROI. We invest a lot in tracking and things of that nature where I do think the self-reported attribution plays a significant role. I know that I've seen, especially with social media, if during the checkout or request a demo or whatever, the call to action says, how did you hear about us? And they can self report, you know, a lot of times you'll see all of sudden your social media numbers spike where people are like, oh, I saw you on social media. They may not remember the exact creator or where or what platform, but that's really where they saw you. And eventually that was, if they're willing to report that as probably a significant piece of the pie.
Chelsea Clark12:35 — Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Benjamin Ard12:58 — Have you seen something similar? Do you encourage that kind of behavior or is it a lot of it just like look at this as content and then the reach and everything is kind of the bonus, the icing on the cake. Is that kind of how you view that?
Chelsea Clark13:04 — Yeah, depends on if they're a startup, they're a new company. Definitely I emphasize the content thing because once a company has been going for a few years, they do get lots of content. It might not be great. You just see they can whitelist and there could be things wrong with it. But really for a brand that's especially a product, like a consumer brand that sells something physical, they get a lot of content. So at that point really the sell is like having an audience you can retarget, right? That's super valuable. Email lists, whatever their CTA is that gets people somehow in their wheelhouse.
Yeah, in the beginning it's definitely content because those brands need that and that's something they're willing to pay for. That's a hard sell for a brand that's like 30 people tag us every day, we have too much content. That could be a problem too. We have literally too much content. A lot of campaigns still have promo codes per influencer. Even back in the day lots of brands would ask me, are promo codes still a good thing to give out?
And I think that either like a campaign as a whole promo code is better. And that was always my position because again, I just intuitively knew I might see things for, you know, five or four or five times. And on the fifth time I buy it, well, those first four people helped, right? And some people don't have that even. I mean, that's common sense. I didn't say anything like super intelligent there, but you know, then you cut those people and you only rehire the people that sold and you're missing part of it. So you know.
Benjamin Ard14:19 — Yeah. Mm.
Chelsea Clark14:26 — I would look at the sum that I'm spending on marketing a year and make sure that I'm comfortable with it and not worry so much about attribution because quite frankly, if you're a product that doesn't live on social media, whether it's through influencers posting or running ads, I don't know how you reach people anymore. I mean, podcasts listening, there's, you know, but not, you know, in terms of like a cheap, accessible way, you have to be doing one of those two things and you need content for both of those.
Benjamin Ard14:50 — OK, one final question, because we're almost out of time, Chelsea. These go by quick. I'm a business B2C, B2B, doesn't matter. And I want to work with creators and influencers. But I want to dip my toes in. I need to try something to see if it's an avenue for the business. How do I get started? Like, what do I do to kind of get my first taste of that whole avenue? Because unlike a lot of other channels where people have experimented with them, I do imagine a lot of people haven't even touched this yet. How did they start for the very first time? Because I imagine they're going to think, okay, well, let me go to that platform and reach out to people individually or, you know, but what would be your recommendation for like going from zero to one on this kind of a situation?
Chelsea Clark15:19 — Yeah. I'm not sure — if they have something that women touch, they should reach out to me. Our campaigns start like 2K, which is not a lot, right? That's a normal size investment for something to start. So let's take the case where you have a product that's like $100 or more, which is the easiest value to gift, right? People don't want to work for free for a toothbrush that's $8 up, obviously. So just for this example, if I wasn't going to use a company like us or anything else and I had a product that was giftable, I would probably look, I would find like four or even three, I'd find three brands that my customers also buy from and I would go through their tagged content on Instagram because those brands have vetted and worked with creators and you can see how it's performed. It's the same audience demographic that you're looking for. So someone else has done a lot of the work for you in that way, right? But especially if it's a brand that has a lot of money and you think does a good job, you're taking a lot of liberties here, but let's just keep going with this. I would probably reach out to 50 of them and try to gift 10 of them. And you could do that on your own pretty easily. You get their email, send them an email. Most creators that are under 10K audience size are still open to gifting. I would limit it by that and just have a list of 50, reach out to them, and I'm for sure 10 would say yes. And I would start with that. Find a good, you know, get AI to write you a great brief, definitely give them a brief, and have them agree to what they're doing.
And most of the time it's a reel and stories. That's mostly what you can get out of $100 with a value.
Benjamin Ard16:51 — Love it. So you're saying, hey, in exchange for my gift, would you mind posting about it, basically? Do you typically send two of them so they can do a giveaway, or is it just one for the actual content?
Chelsea Clark16:54 — Yeah, exactly. And I'd be looking for a reel. You know, you could ask. You know, I don't think it's worth it for someone that small unless you feel like people would really enter, but some creators don't like doing giveaways. So I would just keep it simple.
Benjamin Ard17:10 — I love it. Perfect. Well, Chessy, this has been amazing. I'm sure our audience is going to love this. For anyone interested in reaching out and connecting with you online, how and where can they find you?
Chelsea Clark17:19 — LinkedIn is great. I don't personally have a — have social pages. So LinkedIn is perfect. I have an open profile. You can message me. I'm happy to shoot an answer back. Like I have this product. Could I work with influencers? What would I pay? I love those kinds of little questions. So definitely I will answer. Yeah.
Benjamin Ard17:33 — Love it. Very cool. For everyone listening, scroll down to the show notes. Regardless of what platform you're on, we will have Chelsea's LinkedIn profile right there. Click on it, connect with Chelsea. Again, Chelsea, thank you so much for the time and insights today.
Chelsea Clark17:46 — Thanks, I appreciate the questions.
