1413: Stack Influence: Micro Influencer Secrets for Amazon and Shopify Success with Influencer Marketering Expert William Gasner

Robert Plank 0:01 What if you could turn hundreds of everyday customers into your most powerful sales team without even paying for those traditional ads? Well, William Gastner did just that. He is the CMO of stack influence.com where micro influencers drive brand advocacy at scale. He's a six time founder, seven figure e commerce seller, and we are going to be talking about this amazing concept called using micro influencers with your E commerce brands, especially in this world that's flooded with the UGC, the user generated content. How do we stand out and how do we avoid many of those pitfalls that we hear? We've always heard the stereotypes, the horror stories about influencer marketing. So how can we do all this without our brand wasting money? Well, Mr. William is here to help us out, to educate us. So Mr. William Gassner, glad to see you and glad to speak with you. Happy to have you. And so what did what did I miss there? What are the gaps to be filled in? As far as yourself, your focus and passion? What are you up to?

William Gastner 1:08 You nailed the high level overview, but I'll give you a little deeper dive into my backstory. So

William Gastner 1:18 as you mentioned, been very much in the entrepreneurship startup world. For a long time, my main focus was in tech startups. So co founded a previous kind of marketplace. Weirdly, I've had a fascination with marketplace softwares, which is kind of crazy because they're like the hardest business to build with two different users.

William Gastner 1:39 But stack influence is a marketplace business and and love the challenge, but my other main kind of passion and focus has been in E commerce. So have founded and run numerous different e commerce businesses over the past 15 years, ranging from jewelry companies to cutting boards to teeth whitening to toys and became a seven figure seller on that journey and throughout selling products online, utilized a lot of different influencer tactics to grow those brands, which really led me and my co founder to build stock influence. And the big reason behind that was we used every single tactic on the gambit right is from online ads to email marketing to

William Gastner 2:29 SEO to influencers, right, and we found influencers were kind of the best bang for our buck. And also used different spectrums influencers, which we can dive into a bit deeper. But what we found was these smaller creators, these micro, nano influencers, what the industry calls them, mostly people with and as a definition of less than 100,000 followers, really provide us, provided us with the best ROI. But we faced a

William Gastner 2:54 bunch of challenges dealing with these people. One is, was very difficult to find enough people for our brand, right? Maybe finding five people wasn't that hard, but what we want to do for a lot of our E commerce brands was find hundreds, if not 1000s, of people who are willing to promote the product. That was the first challenge. The second challenge, once we solved that first one, was, okay, we have 1000 people who want to do promotions for us in this next month. How do we manage them? Right? Like, how do we answer all their questions? How do we get product to them? How do we deal with all the back and forth logistics? And that posed even a greater challenge of even utilizing a huge amount of like virtual assistants and spreadsheets, etc. So what we started to do is actually build out our own internal software is to actually automate a lot of the challenges that we face, automate outreach to people so we could scale them up on our automate a lot of the product shipments and the management, the communications and that really just evolved into its own system and company in itself. And that was the birth of stack influence. So that's kind of the background there. But happy to dive into any other specific topics I've missed anything?

Robert Plank 4:02 Yeah, and there's so much great advice just packed into that, right, that you that you kind of pursue those hard challenges. You say, hey, marketplace software, it's hard enough to get people to, like, use your software, but now there's, like, these two sides that have to be balanced. And you say, Hey, I know what's also really difficult. E commerce, that's that's such a jungle. And then you say, well, and then that led to building the software that kind of scratched your own itch, right? You said, like, as a stereotypical entrepreneur, you created all this chaos. You say, like, hey, like, there's the solution doesn't exist with the micro influencers and finding them and the back and forth and the VAs and the shipping and all that communication, and let's build the software that solves our problem. And we're not the only ones. Other people are frustrated with traffic in general, but also with their influencer marketing. And then we say, well, if the solution is to find more smaller influencers.

Robert Plank 4:59 Versus a few big ones where you're just rolling the dice. Okay, but then how do we manage that? Well, cool. Now that is how we end up with stack influence, which connects brands to everyday creators. You automate your product promotions and scale up your brand awareness and online growth and so as far as us getting more understanding about, like, how this works. As far as like, pursuing the micro and nano influencers versus just regular influencers, like, what's a good like, example or a success story? As far as like, someone's got some like, e commerce brand and product, they say, hey, the Facebook ads and the Google ads. I'm so frustrated. I want to try micro influencer marketing. How does that work?

William Gastner 5:44 Absolutely. Let's dive in. So let me give also high level definition of the influencer landscape before I go into all the details of the best practices for the micro influencers. First off, influencer marketing started with these celebrities, and it's honestly, when people hear influencer, they think of the Sydney sweeneys, the Kardashians of the world, right, the celebrities. And that was the basic and most logical path to utilize an influencer, right? Was that, like someone has millions of followers, I give them a product to promote, I'm gonna get mass awareness and sales the challenge, or the kind of where the shift has happened in the past few years, is that a lot of these celebrities, even though there's clout that surrounds them and there's value to them, not to say that they're not valuable at all, but trust has diminished over time. People now know that these celebrities are getting paid enormous amounts of money to do promotions, and when you see that, it's very similar also to an ad, right? Like you see an ad online from a brand, you know that there's huge amounts of ad budget behind that, and it's less authentic and less trustworthy. And so what brands started to realize, including ourselves, was that, what if we start kind of collaborating with kind of these everyday, average people, people who might only have a few 1000 followers, right? They're much more authentic, they have a trusted audience, and they have a very more limited reach. But again, if you can scale up those collaborations, if you have 1000 people with 10,000 followers, right, it's 10 million total reach. The second thing that's changed in the last few years that's very important to realize is that social media platforms have evolved, and it used to be the case where follower base was the key metric, right? Like, if you posted and had 100,000 followers on Monday and by Wednesday, all of those 100,000 followers were on social media, pretty much most of them would have seen your piece of content. Now, maybe only 1% actually sees the content. A very small percentage of people who follow you, unless they're very engaged with your profile, will actually see the content that you produce. And the second big change, or evolution, was that social media now realized, hey, if there's a great piece of content someone produces, I don't care if they have 100 followers, if other people like might like that content, and we show it to maybe 300 people, and then to 3030 1000, all of them really engage with it. We're gonna keep pushing it. So you have these profiles that have literally, sometimes hundreds of, just hundreds of followers, that get millions of views. And so the landscape of social media has really become democratized to where basically anyone with a social profile can be an amazing promoter. Now, not every promotion goes viral, obviously, and that's where you really need to scale this out and diversify your risk, but it really made this power to these smaller creators, less than 100,000 followers, as I mentioned, that the now industry defines as micro or nano influencers, to where it's like the best strategy. And then on top of that, besides just the promotional side, you're getting content, it's usually cheaper at stack influence. We actually built a model around what the industry calls product seating, so we exchange a free product for social promotion and then reward people for the results that they get, as opposed to, I'm going to take a bet of paying some of them 1000s of dollars, and I might get zero results. I might get great results, right? But it can be totally hit or miss, as opposed to that. Smaller creators, a lot of the times, if you incentivize them properly, are willing to do an initial collaboration just for your product yourself. So that's basically the landscape of how kind of social media and influencer marketing has evolved. Now, if you're trying to get started with it, right, um, you can start small, like start DMing people within kind of your niche. Maybe you are selling, supplement protein powder, and you're trying to find people who are interested in fitness, maybe you are looking for local demographics, let's say all in the US. Maybe you search for people who are using the hashtag, LA Fitness, right? LA Fitness is are only in the US. Obviously, if someone's using it, they're probably interested in fitness.

William Gastner 5:44 Is find these types of people come up with what we call an influencer brief, some sort of education on your product and your brand. What kind of product direction would you like to a promotional direction would you like to push someone in

William Gastner 5:44 and then kind of reach out to them via DM, maybe at their email, and get them a product, get them to try to promote, right?

William Gastner 5:44 You can start really small. The beautiful thing about micro nano influencers is you basically just need product. You don't really need any budget. And when you're starting out, that's very difficult. But even if you're an established brand, I mean, Unilever, just this year, announced that they're taking 50% of their entire marketing and ad budget and putting it towards influencers. So you could see how some of the most established conglomerate, CPG, DTC brands in the world are realizing that their money is better well spent driving and creating this community of authentic advocates, you could say, as opposed to investing in the billion dollar bunch of Facebook meta, right?

William Gastner 5:44 And Amazon and Google, right? So it's a crazy world. Now, very not difficult to get in, but it becomes a challenge of, again, actually scaling and managing, which is where stack influence can help.

Robert Plank 7:22 Ooh, yeah, it's it's bizarre, but also cool to think about just the way that the social media algorithms have just set up, but then also changed and evolved, right? That when it was less crowded, of course, it made sense someone had 10 million followers to over the course of a couple of days, show that to everyone, but it's so crowded you go and your news feed is just so jam packed, so the algorithm shows less of that. But then if you post something and it gets a lot of engagement, it keeps expanding, expanding kind of allowing anyone, even with that small following, to just potentially go viral, or at least get a lot of views. And so that and that, in that sense, it does make sense to like kind of hedge, the all many smaller bets, instead of the one big bet. And then also the kind of value that you're saying in like, having all this established content, because we're all looking for, like, if there's a person or a company or a brand, you search them, and you see what kind of presence is out there, right? You see, like, Are there tick tock, posts, ex posts, YouTube videos, and if there's nothing, it's like, uh, this person isn't even established. But there's like, 1020, even more search results. Like, okay, this is real. This. This person's actually getting out there. And so it's great to hear some of these revelations, a has that you've had where, especially with the micro, nano influencers, they're following this so small that you just many times need to give them the product. But then the bottleneck there is in the scaling of it, the secret sauce. And so as far as, I'm sure you've seen some crazy stuff, well, you already told us about some crazy stuff. But as far as, like, some brand that's used your platform, do you have a fun story to tell in that department? Absolutely. So besides the kind of some use cases and crazy data that I've seen of just like profiles with literally, like, only a few 100 followers getting millions of views, which is just unbelievable to me. It's like that world has shifted so dramatically. Another really cool use case for influencers, for anyone who's listing, who's an E commerce seller, and specifically sells on an online marketplace. So think like Amazon, Walmart target,

William Gastner 13:38 is the growth that can be implemented there, and honestly, search engine marketplaces anywhere. So I'll start with Amazon, and then I want to also just touch on, actually how Google's changed in literally the last year.

William Gastner 13:53 But on the Amazon marketplace, we see, and have seen consistently, some amazing growth for influencer marketing, especially micro influencers. And the reason being is that Amazon is a search engine similar to Google, right? It's just an E commerce search engine, but similar to Google, when someone searches for something, I assume most of you listening have bought something at least one time of your life on Amazon,

William Gastner 14:17 when you go and search a topic, about 75% of people do not go past the first page and the top five listings. I think the stat is like 70% of the people even on that first page buy the top five listings, right? So when you first launch on Amazon or Walmart, etc, you're probably on page 5733 right? Maybe 50,733 so

William Gastner 14:43 it's very and you have zero visibility. Some people think, Hey, I'm going to launch and I'm going to just instantly start making sales, because half of every single e commerce sale in the US goes to Amazon.

William Gastner 14:53 But the bottom line is, it's a risk for Amazon to show you at all near the top, because if your product is.

William Gastner 15:00 Very good. They're going to lose out on sales. They make commissions for every single sale that happens on the marketplace. And so the only way that they can determine where to position you is through data. Right? Is when someone comes to listing, do they convert? Do they add the product to the cart? Do they favorite it? Do they buy it and then leave a review? Right? Like, what actions do they actually take and when they don't have any data, initially, it's very hard for them to be confident to list your listing. So what we found, though, is that by driving influencer marketing, which naturally is a trusted form of promotion, right, those sales are some of the most impactful sales on marketplaces like Amazon, because they convert really well, even if they're small amounts of conversions.

William Gastner 15:44 And what we've seen as far as E commerce brands results, is that I've seen brands go from page 100 to page one, right, just from providing Amazon the data from these high converting sales, and then all of a sudden their literally ROI was like 15x right? Because on page 100 they were barely making that many sales. I think they were doing like a few 100 sales a month. And then all of a sudden, once they got to that first page for this high volume keyword, they were making 1000s of sales a month, right? And so, and I see that over and over and over again for brands that implement this is a kind of a newer strategy that's come out in the past two, three years, but amazing results there. And similarly, what we're seeing just this year is a new shift, and I'm going to assume that we're going to start seeing similar kind of search ranking results here is on Google. So Google just announced that,

William Gastner 16:42 along with Instagram, that Instagram posts will now start get getting fed into search algorithms, right? And all the AI is also picking up on this as well. So the brands that aren't investing in a lot of kind of content creation, whether it's them promoting it or influencers promoting it are really going to left, be left behind, because without that, all of the algorithms now are looking at that social data. They're looking at who's talking about it in the same way that you Robert mentioned, like, that's how the consumer does it, right? Is like, you look at x, you look at LinkedIn, you look at Reddit, right? Instagram, like, where is your brand being presented? And that's the value to actually generating a whole bunch of content that now you have a plethora or war chest to repurpose on all these channels. But if you can get this kind of army of people to be promoting for you,

William Gastner 17:33 it's just going to only help not only your E commerce presence, but also your search presence, your presence within AI engines, and, yeah, it's a kind of new Wild West, but content is king these days, and if you can scale it up, you can become kind of the next big brand.

Robert Plank 17:52 Oh, yeah. And it's just it's so much fun to think about, right, like, in a lot of different contexts, when you think about, like, having affiliates promote your E commerce product, or you, when you think about, like, even what you're doing here, right? Like, you could be filming a bunch of little videos for a YouTube channel and making a bunch of posts and posting content and getting a few views, but you go and you go to other people's shows, right? Get on other people's YouTube channels, you get backlinks. You just, it's not all about you, it's about this army of people that you're assembling. It's a lot of fun to think about, right? It's like playing army figurines and setting up the different pieces on the board and saying like, hey, who am I going to lead into battle? What will this team be to help get the word out about my brand? But I imagine that there are ways to mess it up, right? Whether they try to do it themselves without your platform, or maybe even they use your platform but they don't implement correctly. So with everything you've seen, what do you have to tell us about the mistakes, the missteps? Where might people go wrong with micro influencer marketing?

William Gastner 18:56 Absolutely. So first thing I will say that people go wrong is giving up too early, because, again, it can be hit or miss like any influencer promotion, and better to hit or miss when you're giving away a free product than paying someone hundreds or 1000s of dollars, right? So that's one thing. Is like, some people work with three people, and they're like, didn't really drive that many sales. This is not for me, right? And it's a one, a long game and two, look at all of the value that you're getting provided. So that's one thing that I see occasionally, is like, some people just test it for themselves and say, like, influencers are not for me, and like, all of their competition just cruises by them and by implementing the same strategy, but actually scaling it. The second thing, regarding if you believe in influencers, and you realize that it's a valuable thing, is not finding the right people, right so you want to have people who align with you,

William Gastner 19:54 I like to shift the term of influencers to passion promoters. Find people who are passionate.

William Gastner 20:00 Passionate about the niche that you play in and engage with those people, right? Because at the end of the day, again, influence is correlated with authenticity and trust, and so if you find people who actually exude a passion which is naturally authentic and trustworthy, they're going to actually be a great promoter for you, at least the odds are more in your favor.

William Gastner 20:25 So finding that alignment.

William Gastner 20:28 The next thing is, I would say some people honestly curate people's prompts too much right like let people have their own creative control. Obviously, direct them in the right way. Maybe you know that your product looks the best when it's actually utilized, like in a video, or you know that your boxing you spend a huge amount of money on your packaging, and an unboxing video actually works really well, right? Maybe prompt people with what you understand as being a high converting kind of video or graphic, but let them have the creative freedom to kind of curate it to their audience, because they know their audience the best. And you'd be surprised with what people can come up with, right like, put it out into the creative ecosystem,

William Gastner 21:16 and then I would say kind of the last really tidbit of advice is this is something that you don't realize for a while, is like as I recommended before, and what our platform focuses on is product seating, right? Product compensation. Obviously, that's the cheapest way to go about influencers, as opposed to paying someone hundreds or 1000s of bucks, you give them a free product fantastic, right? But you'll quickly realize, once you find people are willing to do this is the natural step is to say, hey, like, you reach out to someone they're interested in promoting for you. You're like, great, send me your shipping address. I'll get you the product this week. You ship them the product, and then what happens is, like, 20 to 40% of the time

William Gastner 22:00 it's just crickets. And you don't hear from them. You follow up with them, and you're like, hey, person like, Did you where's my social promotion, right? And they're like, Oh, I'm gonna get to it. Something came up, blah, blah, blah, and you end up never getting anything from them. And it happens much more often than you think, like, you lose a lot of inventory from a product seating model. So what we actually shifted the model at stack influence to do, because we faced this huge amount internally, was we find people who are willing to become real consumers of the brands we work with. We used to do this ourselves, like one, engage with your real consumer base, so someone who already bought your product reward them after creating the continent. If they don't do anything, there's no loss, right? If you find someone new, get them to become a real consumer, right? And then once they complete that, social posts say, Hey, I'm going to give you your money back. Maybe I'll give you some monetary reward based off how the social posts actually performed, etc, etc, give them put some skin in the game, right? And that is another big pitfall a lot of people quickly realize, once they start doing product seating. There's a few others, but I'll leave it at that. Let me know if you have any questions.

Robert Plank 23:10 Yeah, and that's all helpful, just like understanding human nature, and especially that skin in the game part, right? That, and we've all been there, right? If there's, if it's for free, if someone gives us something, it feels like a chore, but if we're earning for already a buyer, a passionate user of it, then it makes sense that that would get a better response, getting a better result. And so it's just my brain is just literally exploding with all the possibilities and these like kind of clever solutions that you provided, but because we only just met, and I only just now found out about stackinfluence.com and a lot about this kind of micro influencer space. I'm sure that there is a really good question that I could be asking you, if only I knew what to ask so in this conversation we're having, is there a missing, hidden question that I should be asking you? I just don't know to ask you,

William Gastner 24:03 you asked me some fantastic questions, but I will say

William Gastner 24:07 the biggest question is that you haven't yet asked me, is, why stack influence? What if I don't want to do this myself? What are the options out there? So regardless of even stock influence as an option.

William Gastner 24:22 An answer to that is that, yes, there's a huge amount of ways to go about influencer marketing, right? Besides just doing it yourself, I always recommend brands just try to get their feet wet manually, doing something

William Gastner 24:37 just to see the pitfalls and understand the value of what other platforms can provide, right? So you're not biased basically by them. But there's really three pillars of different solutions out there that you can tap into if you're trying to really ease your way into influencers or really scale it out. The first is agencies, naturally, a lot of different influencer agencies out there. Now the challenge.

William Gastner 25:00 With them is that they charge an arm and a leg to utilize their platforms, also harder to scale, but at least they're dealing with the day to day logistics of managing everything. The second solution is software, or SaaS companies. So there's a huge amount of kind of these database softwares almost like CRMs, meaning that like they have a huge database of influencer contact info and then some tools to reach out to them. They charge a big a monthly fee, but they do save you time, and they can kind of save you on that outreach or identification part of the equation. Right now, the challenge to those is there's no guarantee you reach out to 1000 people that you even get one. So you're paying fees to access people, but you might not actually get results right, or even people responding to you, let alone results from the influencers.

William Gastner 25:52 So can be really good if you have a big marketing budget and like you're trying to identify, actually some of the larger influencers. Like, I'd pay $1,000

William Gastner 26:00 multi $1,000 per month. If I'm going to pay $50,000 to a large influencer, I need to make sure that person is really good, right? Might as well use a database to sort through a lot of people to do that now, with micro influencers may be much more difficult to implement, and that's where marketplaces, or marketplace software is like. Stock influence are really good solution for the smaller creators, in the sense that they've built out, like ourselves, a dedicated community of creators where they actually don't just have people sitting in a database with never communicated with them, they have like an engaged app and people consistently doing things, understanding the logistics And the process, and then also have the tools to not only tap into that user base so that you can scale, but also to automate. The management, the logistics. Have already faced all those pitfalls before, and are creating solutions around that. So those are really the three pillars to if you're not trying to do something manually, you're trying to kind of outsource it, or save some time doing it where, where you should look nice. And it seems like that's a really good solution, because it's like the it goes back to John D Rockefeller, who said, Well, if I had the choice between 100%

Robert Plank 27:13 of one person versus 1% of 100 people, I'll choose all those extra people, because there's all this extra manpower, and we've seen those databases or those search tools where they say, Hey, here's a directory. And we've never even met this influencer. We have no idea who they are, but, but here they are. Imagine if you use your phone to call an Uber, and Uber said, hey, you know this person's never driven for us, but good luck. Who knows if they'll even show up to pick you up, and if they do, maybe you'll be It'll be dangerous. So it makes a lot of sense that you have this actual marketplace, right? Not just a CRM, not just directory, but this excellent service you provide at stack influence.com where they analyze your niche carefully, hand pick authentic micro influencers for your products, coordinate all campaign requirements, manage the creative timeline and guarantee all social posts without inventory loss. So if someone says, Man, a lot of what Mr. William Gaster had to say made so much sense about kind of splitting up the the ad dollars into smaller micro influencers to having like, this army of people help me out to then kind of think through the human nature of it. What's the next step here? Is it just to go to stackinfluence.com and create an account? Absolutely. Yeah, stackinfools.com, top right hand corner, click on the Sign Up button. It'll actually prompt you to get in a call with one of our influencer experts, because we just want to understand your niche, your growth goals, make some recommendations based off what stage of growth you're in, and they're all very good experts in this world, so value that time. It's free, and once you get on a call, we'll kind of give you access to the platform. And then, very simple to get started is like, you set what your goals are, like, how many influences Do you want to do? What's your time frame? What products do you want to promote? Upload a little product info, and then sit back, relax and let the platform deal with all the heavy lifting. Very cool, very awesome. Well, it makes a lot of sense to pursue this kind of, like, two tiered ad system this way, especially if you've been frustrated in the past with Amazon ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, Facebook ads, all those other things where you say, Well, I'm just like tweaking the numbers, but I'm not really seeing the results work out. Well, have this army of people helping you out. You can find them at stack influence.com where you can get Branded Contents, accumulate testimonials, strengthen your marketing materials and generate traffic at scale with their micro influencer marketing platform that is stack influence.com but before I let you go, Mr. William Gassner, it's time for the scary part of the podcast where I try to stump you. I try.

Robert Plank 30:00 Put you on the spot by asking about a fun quote or lesson that has served you. So what comes to mind as far as a fun quote or lesson,

William Gastner 30:09 quick fun quote is it takes 10 years to become an overnight success.

William Gastner 30:16 Is that most people we see all of these success stories where startup companies, businesses, celebrities like you become famous and multi million millionaire in a year, right? And it's even becoming more popular with crypto and AI these days. But the real bottom line is the majority of the time it takes a long time to build something great and and you see that, where I say it takes 10 years to be an oversight success, you see the overnight success story, but you don't realize the time it took for someone or some company to actually get to the point that they're at. And yeah, it has resonated with all my businesses, every single e commerce business I was involved in past, startup companies like it's led me to where I am today. I've been involved in stock influence for so since 2018 so almost seven years now. So we're almost getting close to the 10 year hopefully the tenure is a success, but,

Robert Plank 31:11 yeah, let's face my quote, I love it, persistence and perseverance, and let's keep that in mind as we're growing our own e commerce brand and using micro influencers to do it@stackinfluence.com

Robert Plank 31:22 We'll see you there. And thank you so much, Mr. William Gastner, for educating and entertaining us and helping us along. Stackinfluence.com it's an amazing platform. Thanks for creating it.

William Gastner 31:31 Thanks for having me on you.