How to Get More From Influencers by Spending Less | #642

Influencer marketing is still a young line item, the pricing is all over the shop, and you can spend real money on a creator without ever being sure what you got back. So plenty of teams treat it with one eyebrow raised.

But the problem was never influencers.

Most brands treat influence as one big post, from one big name, a single moment they hope lands. The brands getting real value treat it as a relationship instead: the same credible people showing up more than once, who actually believe in the product.

The brands getting this right do three things differently.

In this playbook, based on a conversation with Jess Hatzis, co-founder of Frank Body and Willow & Blake, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about getting more from influencers for less:

• Influence works on frequency, not one big post, so the same credible people need to show up for you again and again
• Pick creators who already believe in your product, then treat them like partners rather than a media buy
• Bring creators together in person and do it on repeat, which buys frequency, content and a real bond for about a tenth of the cost

Connect with Jess Hatzis Explore Willow & Blake

Transcript

Marketplaces Are Getting Complicated

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Marketplaces in Australia aren't just emerging or a nice side piece to D2C anymore. They're established, they're complex, and they are moving fast. Amazon continues to accelerate, TikTok shop is looming, and for most brands, managing a marketplace properly has become a full-time job. Forecasting, content, ads, logistics, compliance, it's a lot and it requires specialist knowledge. That's where Pattern can help. Patent don't just advise on marketplaces, they actually buy your product and then sell it on global marketplaces as your partner. That means they have real skin in the game. They only win if you win. Simple as that. Through their marketplace accelerator model, Patent handles everything from inventory forecasting and listing creation through to advertising, fulfillment, and international expansion. So if marketplaces feel overwhelming, or you know you should be doing more, but you just don't have the time, the team, or the energy, contact Patton to help you make the most of the marketplace opportunity. Learn more at au.patton.com. Influencer

Why Influencer Marketing Feels Risky

SPEAKER_00 1:10

marketing is one of those line items that can feel a bit hit or miss. It's still a relatively young industry. The pricing is all over the shop, and you can spend real money on creators without ever being sure of what you get back for it. So I understand why a lot of teams treat it with one eyebrow raised. But I've started to think that the problem isn't influences, it's the whole way we've framed the whole thing. We've been treating influence as one big post from one big name, a single moment where we hope that it lands. If you set it up like that, it's definitely going to feel like a gamble. The brands getting real value have a different idea of what influence even is. It's not a post, it's a relationship. It's working with people who actually believe in what they're selling, who want to help connect you to their audience, and who show up for you more than just once. It's about building a real bond, not just buying a placement. Jess Hatsis has helped build more than a billion dollars worth of consumer brands, from co-founding Frank Boddy to rebuilding 134-year-old Betts shoes over the last year. She's landed on a way of working with creators that costs a fraction of the usual spend and gives a brand far more back. Let's hear it from Jess than three different operators who each do a different part of influencer really well.

Jess Hatzis On Community And Credibility

SPEAKER_05 2:44

I'm really particular with the influencers that we work with. I have never found influencers with millions of dollars to be particularly great at awareness or conversion. So we were very particular with wanting to work with people who had strong fashion credentials because for us it was about getting people to see the brand through that light, not a sort of a massive shoe or not a school shoe or not where the mum would go and buy the dad's boot for the season, her shoe and the kids' school shoe. It's like this is a fashion destination, you're gonna get trends that are straight up the wrong way at a commercially friendly price here. So therefore we need to partner with people that we can borrow that clout from. And we wanted them to be repeat engagements. It was about bringing all of those influences together. So there was this real sense of community and we could establish strong relationships with people because that hasn't changed. Good influencer marketing has always been about building really strong relationships with influencers, and so that was what we did at Frank. That's what we were doing at best, what we've done with every brand in between, and not just throwing money here, there, and everywhere, but also having realistic expectations for what influencer marketing does. Every now and then you find a unicorn that immediately translates to sales, but otherwise I think about it as a frequency effect. It's about you know the same way as putting billboards up. I wouldn't put one billboard up in one random suburb and expect it as going to sell all of my product. Influencers are living, breathing billboards online. And so you need to have multiple engagements. People need to see something half a dozen times before they're actually going to care. It needs to come from half a dozen credible sources, each with their own unique spin on things. We did a lot of eventing at Frank, and I always wanted those events to feel really different. So every now and then, you know, a lunch style event, which is beautiful and curated, makes sense because you're trying to create an experience that feels refined or reposition something. At Frank, I was like, never do I want to have everyone sitting around a table with a bunch of florals because that was so a brand for us. So we would instead invite influencers to like the smash room where they were breaking beauty standards, they'd be in jumpsuits and they'd be beating the shit out of crockery with baseball bats. And it was about rewriting the narrative about what it means to lose in the skin that you're in. And then at Willow and Blake, we run a lot of events. So it's really the only type of outward marketing that we do is bringing together tastemakers, decision makers, strategists all in one room and having thought-provoking conversations. So they're often centered around some kind of panel or keynote presentation. The last one that we ran was called How Women Shop with Adwina McCann, who's the editor of Vogue, a woman called Michaela, who's head of brand and marketing at Afterpay, and myself and Brie. And it was a conversation with all women in the room, all women on the panel about how women shop, what is making them tick. And so it was really quite insightful and really community driven. And people came together from all sorts of fashion brands that were having conversations like I touched on at the start. You know, the competitive nature was gone. It was just here's what's working, here's what's not, this is the future, this is great. Have you tried that? And that's what I like about the in-person element because you kind of get past the surface level BS that holds people back from growth.

SPEAKER_04 5:44

And it feels like that's the genuine influence again. Like I look at that and I'm like, that's where the influence is happening. Like you said it perfectly with tastemakers. Like from the outside, from a consumer, you look at that and you think, like, what are they talking about? What's the trends that are going to come out of this? What direction are these people like genuinely influencing? So, did you mean to say eventing before? Like marketing, is that a term? Yeah, we call it eventing. So interesting. So there's like, okay, there's your performance marketing and then there's your eventing.

SPEAKER_05 6:16

Not to be confused with venting, which I also do frequently.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Yeah. You can do both at the same time.

SPEAKER_05 6:20

Do both. Um, wine and wine, that's what I call that. If I'm really honest, from a monetary standpoint, if you're a consumer brand looking to engage influencers, typically a lot more cost-effective to run an event because each individual influencer, if you're looking to work with anyone of kind of any real standing that's separate from a creator, they're very expensive to engage. You might have to pay fees for some people to come to an event, but often you don't if you have the right creative and the right experience that they're looking to get involved with. So you get a ton of content out of it. You build a real relationship, and it usually costs you one tenth that would have to engage each of those people individually.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Did you notice there that Jess isn't really talking about a post at all? She's talking about how you structure the whole relationship so it actually connects and makes impact. So let's get into the lessons.

Lesson One: Frequency Beats One Post

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Lesson one, it's frequency, not one big post. The most useful reframe here when we're talking about influences is to stop treating a single post as the result. On its own, it's one moment, and one moment rarely influences anyone. Influence works on repetition. People need to see a brand a few times from someone they trust before it really makes them take action. So the lever was never a bigger name for a one-off. It's the same credible people showing up for you again and again long enough for your audience to believe it and to take action on it. That holds up on the numbers as well. A new ambassador usually does very little in the first couple of months. The momentum tends to arrive around the fifth to seventh time their audience sees them with you, not the first. Few operators have leaned into that longer than Lust Minerals. Stacy Hollands has kept some of her ambassadors for the better part of a decade, which makes her the clearest proof of what staying power actually buys you, is how she puts it.

SPEAKER_02 8:27

I mean, for us, influencers are, we've been with some of the influencers for eight plus years. So for me, our influencers and our ambassadors are like family. They're a part of our community. Um, and you know, we don't just work with them as a once-off, we build that relationship and build that trust with their community as well. But also, it's just finding those that are genuinely in love with your product and genuinely use your product, yeah, want to share that with their community because they are passionate about it as well. Making sure what we're posting and what they're posting, you're getting those touch points because you know, if an influencer or a community member is seeing a product for the very first time, they need to see it seven times. So we really want to make sure that we, you know, get that ecosystem and they see it here, they see it there. You know, we might even look for friends of the particular ambassador if their budget's a little bit higher to make sure that we're touching as many people as we possibly can and they're seeing it that seven plus times to then want to visit the website and explore us further.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

So before you book another one off, pick a handful of people you genuinely work with for a year and commit to the long game

Lesson Two: Partners Not Placements

SPEAKER_00 9:31

with them. Lesson two, pick people who already believe and treat them like partners. The next shift is about who you choose and how you treat them. A customer can spot a paid post that doesn't fit a creator in about half a second. We've all seen that. And that mismatch is where a lot of the wasted spend goes in influencer. So start with the people who already use and love your product and hopefully are already posting about it for free. Then build a real relationship rather than a transactional relationship. Be responsive, brief them properly, look after them. People who feel valued make better content and they come back on their own. The fashion brand Freddy is a good example of this in practice. Joel, as a party, has built their whole creator approach around treating influencers like partners to the point that they now come to him and he reckons it's the closest thing that he's found to a brand secret. Listen to how he frames it.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

A key part to the formula is really having a very personalized but streambled process from start to finish. So from that initial outreach to the final debrief post-collaboration as well. I think being really responsive and having clear communication guidelines and building those genuine relationships with influencers who genuinely love your brand and products goes a very long way. And I think if there is any secret, I think that is the one that has resulted in many influencers approaching us and wanting to work with us again and again. And it also empowers those influencers to want to create unique and amazing content for us. So so yeah, it it it might sound fairly straightforward and fairly basic, but it is really truly building that those relationships, but being able to do that by utilising technology and systems and processes to be able to really scale that in a cost-efficient way. We want to work with people who genuinely love our brand and and genuinely have want to communicate the benefits of of the Freddy brand to their audiences. And I think by working and being selective with those people that we we do work with, yeah, it's very rare now that we would get burnt.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

So look at how you treat your creators, not just who you pick. The brands that win here run it like a relationship, not a media buy. And that brings us to lesson three. Bring

Lesson Three: Repeatable Events That Scale

SPEAKER_00 12:05

them together and do it on repeat. This is where Jess's eventing comes in. And it's the most cost-effective way to get everything we've just talked about. Bring it all together in one go. Frequency, content, and a real bond all at once. Get the right people in a room or on a walk and do it regularly. The keyword is regular. A single beautiful event is lovely, but then it's gone. A repeated one builds the relationship and gives you a steady stream of content. Jess does it for about a tenth of what booking each person individually would cost, and you don't need her budget to start. You can see the budget-free version of this at Deja Mark. Rosie Collins swaps some of her paid spend for a simple repeating in-person ritual with her customers. And the way she explains the frequency is really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 12:59

We are starting like weekly walks with mums. It's just a way to like meet our customers, meet our community, but you need kind of a frequency around that. I see a lot of brands do these events where customers come and it's a one-off and it's really, really nice, and the whole thing's really beautiful. But for our audience and what they're going through, they need repetition and a frequency of these in-person meetings where you can just talk about meet new people. There's so many people that are saying that they want to meet other people. And that's just not related to motherhood. It's definitely deeper in motherhood. But you'll see this with run clubs happening with younger demographics as well. So that's really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

So pick a simple format that you could run every month and plan for how you amplify that content and turn it into regular content for your brand. If there's one idea that's worth keeping from Jess, and trust me, there were many in that extended conversation, it's that influence was never one big post from one big name. It's a relationship. The brands getting value out of creators right now are the ones treating it that way. The same people showing up more than once who actually believe in the product, brought together often enough to build a real bond. Spend less on those one-off influences, spend more time on the relationship, and you'll get back a lot bigger

The Simple Playbook And Community Invite

SPEAKER_00 14:21

return. Now, if you're trying to work out who's worth building that kind of relationship with or what a simple repeatable event could look like for your business, that's exactly the kind of conversations happening in the Add to Cart community every day. You can join for free with 700 e commerce professionals over on adducart.com.au. That is the playbook for this week. I'll see you next Friday.