Selling Your Invisible Influence, Plus 6 Tips for Your Media Kit feat. Sophie Wood – Ep. 17

Welcome to Negronis with Nord. Today’s episode is about selling your invisible influence beyond the numbers to prove ROI, 6 exclusive tips for your media kit, and explaining the 'iceberg influencer' concept. Featuring our Creative Strategist at Fohr, Sophie Wood. You can submit your questions for future episodes here.

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This episode includes:

• Welcome Sophie Wood!
• The iceberg influencer and invisible influence
• 6 tips for your media kit. What to add that you may not have thought of

Welcome to Sophie Wood!

Sophie Wood: [Drumroll]. Look What The Cat Dragged In. Woo! Woo!

I'm Sophie Wood. I'm a Creative Strategist here at Fohr, and I'm also a beauty, fashion, and lifestyle content creator on Instagram and TikTok. And I'm here to take James' throne. Where is James? You may ask? He's in Italy, looking at wedding venues. So parents are out of town. It's time to kick up our shoes, do this thing for real

Ghia with the girlies. So welcome to episode 17. Where we'll be talking about selling your f*ck, welcome to episode 17, where we will be talking about selling your invisible influence. This topic came out of our pricing webinar, which happened a few weeks ago, where we were talking about invisible influence and the iceberg influencer. And we're gonna get into what that means today.

The value of invisible influence

Sophie: So the viewer question we had is how do we explain the value of invisible influence to brands and clients who are not as 'in it' or only see the numbers? So this term of iceberg influencer originally came from Grace Murray. Who's our VP of strategy. And it was essentially to describe the pain that we feel being on the agency side and trying to explain to brands how there is way more influence that goes beyond engagement rate or vanity metrics like content quality or follower size.

So when you think about the way an iceberg looks like you see the tip of the iceberg, which is what everyone else can see, and the bottom is what not everyone else can see, which is where this comes in. So the tip of the iceberg in this sense would be vanity metrics. You can think of vanity metrics as content quality, follower count and engagement rate. The bottom of the iceberg in this sense would be everything that you cannot see, which would be what we coined as invisible influence. This includes testimonials, trackable sales, engagement, and DMS, consistent over delivery on campaigns, blog traffic, verified reach, and demand. These are all of the things that contribute to someone's influence that brands on the surface cannot see from just looking at your profile. So a great example of this is we had an influencer one time that had a 0.9% average engagement rate into a lot of brands.

Maybe that seems low. But we know on our side that they have over a thousand testimonials and they were part of one of our yearlong ambassador programs where they had over $600 K in trackable sales, which is insane. That also doesn't include untrackable sales of people going into stores and buying items that they had also recommended to people. This is something that we struggle a lot with when trying to convince brands, why it's worth partnering with a specific influencer. When they're really caught up in just numbers, they're caught up in engagement or past sales or what their content quality is looking like. And there's so much more underneath that surface. So we are constantly in this battle of knowing that there is so much influence behind these creators and trying to find a way to effectively communicate that to brands. Fab. So how is this helpful for you?

How can you communicate to brands what your invisible influence is? This can be really helpful when you're pitching yourself to brands, or when you're trying to argue for higher rates, you can pull in these metrics to show your invisible influence that goes beyond just engagement rate, just your content quality, et cetera. So when you're putting together a media kit and you're trying to compile all the ways that makes you a stellar partner, there are some few key tips that not many people include in there that you can help sell yourself to get higher rates or better brand deals.

6 tips to help sell your invisible influence

1. The first one is going down in the DMS. You can pull actual messages that you have from your followers, where they're asking you about a product or telling you about how you influence them to buy something that they really love. All of these things are so valuable and they contribute to something that we call audience sentiment. And this is something that is so valuable for brands. It's like the golden nugget of metrics. So include those in your media kit or include them in an email as to how your audience is engaged.
2. Tip number two, I'll say it once. I'll say it a million times, literally ask your audience for testimonials. On Fohr, you have the ability to ask your followers to leave a short little tidbit about why they follow you, what you've influenced them to buy, what you've influenced them to think or read or write or listen to, et cetera. All of these things are really valuable for us. When we're trying to pitch you to a brand, me as a creative strategist, when I'm trying to tell a brand what makes you so special or what makes your audience so engaged? I will pull from testimonials all the time. You would not believe the things that people say about why they follow you. It's pretty extraordinary. If I do say so myself. You have access to those. I have access to those. We all have access to those to basically just hype you up and get you amazing brand deals.
3. Tip number three, show past link clicks in your stories. This is a metric that a lot of other people don't have access to. We do if you connect to us, but if you're just advocating for yourself, showing past link clicks, when you've driven to a product is super compelling for a brand and can show that you are driving conversions. Also tell me if I'm talking too fast, because James says that I talk on the verge of mania.
4. Tip number four is showing past affiliate sales. So if you're someone who drives to affiliate programs or you've seen conversions directly showing those is really compelling in also proving your ROI when you're posting about products.
5. Tip number five, pretty similar to the DMS is also highlighting comments. There's a lot of great comments that people leave when you're consistently posting about a brand, or they've learned about something new. You can just take a screenshot of those baddies and throw 'em in your media kit. And it's really, really great, really compelling.
6. Tip number six is showing creative concepts or ideas that you have pitched to brands and therefore made content out of can also be really cool. Brands all the time are trying to look for different ways and new ways to partner with creators in a way that feels natural, but also compelling. And if you're someone who has really great creative ideas and you've been able to execute those well, show that, and you can even pitch another idea to the brand that you wanna work with.

And if you have any other ideas of what to include in your media kit, drop it in. The comments would love to hear it and would love to kind of start a conversation between y'all in how you can get the most out of your media kits and get that bread. I'm speaking at a million miles a minute. I need to chill out.

So we try to communicate this to brands as best that we can on Fohr's side. But there's also a lot that you can do on your side when you're either pitching yourself to brands, or you're trying to argue for a higher rate that you can show your invisible influence when thinking about this iceberg influencer model.

To brands: Why influencers are worth the investment

Sophie: And for any of the brands that are out there watching. So there may be some of you out there who are having a tough time convincing to your higher up that influencers are worth investing in. This also ties into that idea of invisible influencer in the iceberg influencer. Sometimes it can feel very surface level in terms of what influencers have to offer when it goes way, way deeper than that. So I'm just gonna spit some knowledge, Newfronts just happened, which is really huge in the tech world. It's a big conference that a ton of social media platforms had TikTok just reported that there is a 26% bump in brand favorability when they're working with creators on the platform.

And that there's a 22% bump in brand recommendations when you're working with brands on the platform and we have found time and time again, that influencer content by far outperforms brands owned content on their own and operated channels. So creators are by far worth investing in, and they are the future of this video era of social. So back to camera A <laugh>.

So as a creative strategist at Fohr, I also do a lot of thought leadership within the industry. So I just recently wrote a blog post about the girl boss to big sister pipeline, which you can check out, I guess we'll link it in the bio, right? We'll link it in the bio. I was also just on our pricing webinar a few weeks back, and I'm sure I'll be on one in the future, but you can follow both Fohr and myself at Goodwoodx to keep up with where you can see me, where you can find me absolutely spitting knowledge.

And you can also check out our next webinar, which is about creator burnout, which will be on May 25th. We will also drop the registration. We will drop the registration link on socials as soon as it's available. Hope to see you there. Thanks so much for watching. Next week, you'll have James here. Maybe tell him how much you enjoyed having me. I don't know. Maybe we'll see each other again soon. Like subscribe, comment, follow us. DM me. Drop by the office. I actually don't come to our office. <Laugh> I literally was saying the other day, the reason I talk so fast is cuz I listened to everything at 1.3 and I didn't realize how psychotic it sounds until we were driving upstate and I put on a audible for, and it was at 1.3 and he was like, what the f*ck? I'm like, let's go IBBs. Does that mean we're actually rolling?

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Cheers, and thanks for watching.

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