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Welcome to Negronis with Nord. Today’s episode is about how to handle brands that are prioritizing conversion over awareness, and what your responsibility is as their creative partner. You can submit your questions for future episodes here.
This episode includes:
James Nord: Okay, welcome Negronis with Nord episode number 16. By the time this airs, it will have already been my birthday. So I'm gonna preemptively. Thank all of you for wishing me a happy birthday. Thank you for the wonderful gifts that you probably will have sent by the time this is published and my trip to Italy was great. Thank you so much for asking. Look last week was great. We did something a little different, you know, I, I did, I took the first half passed the baton to DonYe who finished things up. I was supposed to film another episode this week, but listen, this is, it actually takes a decent amount of energy to do this and like hype myself up. If I film two episodes in one week, you know, I also like, I, I just don't have that much to say sometimes. And so it's hard. But we're gonna do something a little different this time. We're gonna have someone else from the staff. Who's never been on the show. Take over as host. I'm not gonna tell you who yet. I am confident it is going to be great. We'll do something a little bit different and you won't have to look at my mug for a week. A few things before we jump in, nobody's been asking about my thoughts on Elon Musk and Twitter, but I'll lay them out anyway.
So we'll see what happens. Also. We recently had the Met Gala another year goes by another year where I do not get my Met Gala invite, but look, Fohr is growing. I think a table is $300,000 is not that bad. Look, we are just getting closer and closer to Fohr just buying a table. And I'm just gonna say this on camera. So that on the day where I'm going to the met gala to hang out at the Fohr table, I can like post this up, but we're gonna get that table there. It is absolutely possible that somebody watching this right now would get that invite. I got 10 seats, 30 K each, maybe, maybe we want to crowdfund it. We can do you know, a a DAO and and create like a web three. Okay. Let's move on.
James: We had a webinar all about pricing. If you're an influencer and you haven't seen it, you should definitely do that. We'll put the link here. Fantastic. We share some of our POV on where the market is, where it's going, um, and how brands can focus more on value rather than cost and kind of what we see happening in influencer pricing in the next couple of year. So, absolutely take an hour. Watch that if you're a brand, influencer, either super, super valuable, but we had some interesting questions come outta there. One was, um, what was our POV on brands? Prioritizing driving conversion over awareness, especially for one-off campaigns. Ooh. Okay. Let's unpack that first and foremost. If you are being paid for a sponsored post, what is your job? You're selling moisturizer. You're selling the f*cking dream, whatever you're selling, you're selling it. Ultimately your performance, Fohr's performance, all of that is tied to sales.
Let's say your company made a hundred million dollars the year before you spend half a million dollars in influencer marketing, you make a hundred million dollars the next year. You're not gonna be running to reinvest that money there. Right? We want things to go up and to the right. We want to show that we have an impact as an influencer. Just rid yourself of the idea that you are not responsible for selling a product. The more conversion you can show, the easier it's gonna be for you to raise your rates. The easier it's going to be for you to defend what you are charging, the easier it's going to be for you to work with brands on a retained basis. Performance is the most persuasive thing there is. If you can show sales, you know, you have an enormous amount of power. That's my, that's my caveat. Foundational caveat.
Now let's move into the second part of answering this question, which is that attribution is really hard in this space. So many people are still in the place that they say, I believe this works. I can't completely prove the extent to which it works. That is because we all can look at our own behavior and how we are influenced by the things that we see on these platforms and know that it is not being captured through a swipe-up link. You know, it's not being captured through an affiliate link. And so we have this like this gap in what we understand the impact to be and what we can prove the impact to be, and brands are comfortable for the time being with that gap. That gap is going to close up. As we get more tools, Instagram affiliate, TikTok's integration with Shopify livestream shopping, like all of these things are going to make it easier to, you know, for attribution, which actually is going to make it even more important that you can drive sales, right?
You should absolutely center what you're doing. And as you're thinking about it, about trying to be persuasive and trying to, you know, create content that gets your audience to take an action, you know, that performance and that need for persuasion is also why it is so important to work with brands that you care about. It only works when you can give that empassioned real pitch, right? When you can say, listen, I truly truly believe that this product is great. And I think that you should buy it. It is just easy to see when someone is lying.
I'll talk about how we push back on brands a little bit when their sole KPI key performance indicator. For those of you who don't spend your time in meetings talking about acronyms, the way we push back on brands, when they're KPI is sales asking brands, think about the last thing that, that you were influenced on, on a social platform to purchase.
Did you swipe up on the story? Did you, you know, click a link in bio to buy it? Generally not. We say this thing the specific is universal. So that like, okay, my experience is that I don't have that behavior. So it's unrealistic for me to expect that your audience will have that behavior. So that, that helps top of the funnel is big bottom of the funnel, small bottom of the funnel being, I purchased something top of the funnel is I just found out about it, right? And so like, awareness is a big part of that. And so the more people we can get the message out to the more awareness, the more people are in the funnel. And the more the other marketing the brand can do helps move you through the funnel to an eventual purchase. So like awareness is an absolutely a valid KPI for a campaign.
If a brand won't let it go though. And they say, yeah, awareness is great. But like, ultimately what we need is sales. At first, it's just like, good to understand. What's your expectation? You know your account, you've done affiliate deals. You know how much conversion you generally drive. If you have 50,000 followers and the brand says, well, we'd love to sell $20,000 of product off this post. There's nothing you can do. Like, you know, that's gonna fail. That's never gonna happen. It is good to ask the brand. Okay. If it's a conversion, do you have a sense of what success looks like? What are you expecting so that you can make sure you're not walking into a situation where you're destined to fail. Even if you do well, you're going to fail. If their expectations are not aligned with reality, which if you're new to the influencer space, it's not crazy to think that those expectations might not be rooted in reality, right?
If they're focusing on conversion and they only want you to do one post, I would walk away from that campaign. That's not gonna work out. You're never gonna retain that client. It's probably a waste of your time. It does give you a little bit of a bartering trip to try and extend the campaign into something longer. Look, if you're focused on conversion, it needs to be at least three posts. I need to get my audience used to it. I need to show myself using it over a long period of time. And I need to get in a place where I can, I can at the end of that, really, truly authentically recommend this. And my audience has seen me use it for a month, two months, three months, whatever it is. And that's gonna really increase the opportunity for conversion, but also for you understand that you do need to show that more.
Right? I remember talking to Erica Fox from Retro Flame years ago, you know, before she does a sponsored post in the weeks leading up to it, she'll just show the product in her stories without even tagging them. She'll show herself using it. She'll show it in the background, whatever it is, right. Let's say it's a coffee maker. So maybe you have a few mornings where you show yourself making the coffee, but you don't tag it. You don't talk about it. And then she would say a week later, Hey, y'all have seen me testing out this new coffee maker. Absolutely loved it. It's changed my morning routine. And now the audience is like, oh, I have seen you using that. Right? So I trust this, right? And so like, you might have to do a little bit more work to get the product in front of your audience, get them to see it multiple times so that when you ask for the conversion and ask for the sale, they're primed, they understand that you've been using it. They trust you. You know, maybe you've talked about the benefits in a few different ways.
I could have 50 other points on this, but to wrap it up, going back to that idea, that specific is universal.
Currently is impossible to capture every sale that you drive through social, because if I see your coffee maker, and then I'm out for a walk with the fiance on the weekend, and we stop in at a homegood store, and I see that coffee maker and I buy it and take it home. I bought it from your post. It's impossible. Right? We're never gonna be able to tie that purchased back to the Instagram post I saw from you, you know, you help tell that story, right? Let's say they have the affiliate data. And let's say you did, you sold eight coffee machines for $800 and that's, you know, that's not bad.
Then you also got three or four DMS from people saying, oh, I just bought this last week. It's been really great. Or someone in a comment mentions that they're thinking about purchasing it, whatever, screenshot that stuff and send it to the brand as well. Because if they see a couple of DMS of people saying, oh, I, I, I bought this. It was great. Thanks for the recommendation. Even if they don't have the data, then they're saying, oh, there's, there's a lot more here that we're not capturing. They start to get again, get that idea that the specific is universal. This one person bought it. So I now believe that many more people bought it, but you have to give them that story. So make sure you're sharing all of that. Back with the brand, you are taking control of your data and trying to put it into a cohesive story that the brand can ingest and say, okay, I feel like this was a good use of money and we'll be more excited to work with you in the future.
So I've got, you know, the birthday in a couple of days, then I am off to Italy and I will be back in front of this camera in a couple of weeks, hopefully with a wedding venue, locked down. Thank you. How did somebody not do this? They're selling cartoon apes. We should be selling tickets to the met gala in web 3. This is what I'm doing. I quit Fohr, this is my new project. You can, you can fund my DAO on fucking blockchain some, well, it's not yours. It's the community. It's the communities everybody can have. But I one of the rules of this is that if we get the table, I, I have to go. So.
Cheers, and thanks for watching.
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