Full Transcript

Sari 0:00
Welcome to your Food Business Success. This podcast is for early stage entrepreneurs in the packaged food industry, ready to finally turn that delicious idea into reality. I'm your host, Sari Kimbell. I have guided hundreds of food brand founders to success as an industry expert and business coach, and it's got to be fun. In this podcast, I share with you mindset tools to become a true entrepreneur and run your business like a boss. Interviews with industry experts to help you understand the business you are actually in, and food founder journeys, so you can learn what worked and didn't work, and not feel so alone in your own journey. Now let's jump in!

Sari 0:48
Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I am excited to bring on an expert guest. You guys are asking me for more content, more strategies, things to really help you as we go into 2024 in your business, so I'm excited to welcome Yash Shavan, and he is with Seral, and so I'm going to actually just let you introduce yourself. So, welcome to the podcast, and I'll let you give a quick intro.

Yash 1:16
Thank you, Sari. Great, great being on your show. It was good doing the webinar a couple of weeks back, and now we're doing the podcast. So lovely to be here, giving an intro for myself. I'm Yash. My name is Yash. I am the founder at Saral, which is an influencer marketing platform. Basically, we enable, we believe that eventually every consumer brand will partner with creators for distribution and content and marketing, and we want to be the backend that kind of enables all of this, all of the contracts, the relationships between brands and creators. So that's what Saral does. And then, yeah, before this, I usually run an influencer marketing agency, where we scaled influencer programs to 1000s of influencers for brands, and then we figured out all the problems while doing that process manually, and we kind of codified that into the app, that is Saral today. So, yeah, that's like a quick background.

Sari 2:12
It was so great to connect with you, Jordan with FoodBevy connected us, because I kept getting this question from members, from field members, saying, how does this influencer thing work, and is this a good idea? So I went on a mission to find somebody great, and you have been super generous. You came into our Fuel VIP call back in, I guess, October, and shared you got like really detailed on how to create compelling offers for influencers, which is awesome, so if anybody's in Fuel, they can go watch that, but I wanted you to come on today to kind of give us a higher, you know, zoom out just a little bit more, and really let's talk about influencer marketing, what it's all about, and how people could start small, and then we'll talk about common mistakes, so excited to have this conversation.

Yash 3:04
Yep, me too. Let's dive in. Yep.

Sari 3:06
Yeah, let's do it. So, as you know, from coming into Fuel and us chatting, that lot of people listening are very small, you know, they might be starting out in cottage food, where they're making the product out of their home, selling at farmers markets, selling online onto their own e-commerce store, and then some are also selling wholesale, but everybody's definitely, like, you know, early stage, not, and because of this, they don't have huge budgets, kind of limited, a lot of people don't have a lot of experience in all things marketing, so tell us a little bit about, you know why influencers is that the right area in your opinion? Is that a good area to invest in when you're small?

Yash 3:54
Yeah, totally. I think first off it is a misconception that influencer is supposed to be expensive. It's a narrative that's peddled a lot by talent agencies and influencer agencies that have these bigger influencers who are almost celebrities, you know, like the typical girl and the bikini guy with the six pack abs on the beach, kind of in like the typical influencer person, that is a terrible idea for any small brand who's looking to start off right, don't do that, that is definitely expensive, but influencer as a channel, as a marketing channel, there's other strategies within that, which you can use when you're early on, specifically what I'm talking about is generally influencer seeding or gifting, which you could, which is called basically you send out free product to influencers, so all your investment is ending off your cost of goods, right? So you're sending free product and expecting them to post about you, so that's like the leanest, easiest way to get started with creative marketing, but before that, I think if you're a founder who's like you described, you know, they're just building their own product, independent, very small team, or just you're just soloing it, which is like, hats off to you if you're doing that. You might have the question, why should I go with influencers and not run, say, Facebook ads, or do something else, right? I think if your product is unique, ideally, if you're someone building a product, very likely it's not, you're not selling a commodity, it's unique in your own way, right? So, if your product is unique and other people talk, if you interface with your potential customers, they really like it, and they ideally also recommend other people your products, that is, that means you already have some degree of word of mouth, which is the most golden marketing channel to have, because if you have healthy word of mouth, you don't need any other marketing channel ever. You don't have to do anything. Basically, that means word of mouth means your product is so good that people tell other people about your product. So, if you get one person and that one person gets two more people, and those two more people get two more people each, and then, and so on, your business just keeps growing without you doing any marketing, which is what we see with some of the bigger companies, like, say, a Tesla or an Apple, like people like to talk about, like AI just got a Tesla, just got the latest iPhone, right? The reason why it said that Tesla doesn't do any marketing is because the product is so good that people can't stop talking about it, right? So you can have your own kind of microcosm of that, of your product being so good that people can't stop talking about it. And if you have that, or at least some version of that, influencer is a way, the way I look at it, it's a way to put word of mouth on steroids, right? So it's instead of one person talking to two or three of their friends about it. It is one person talking to 50,000 of their fans on social media about it, right? Or talking about you on, you know, on the podcast or something like that. So that's why I think influencer marketing is because it's the most golden marketing channel, and it is amplified, right? It is word of mouth, which is people talking to other people, which is also very trust focused, and it is instead of one to one word of mouth, it is one to many word of mouth. So your product has a higher chance of explosive growth and getting more and more people to try your product, which means you get better quality feedback in higher volumes quicker, which means you're able to iterate and also make your product better, faster, right? So, all of these things is why I think you should go with influencers. Another thing that just came to mind is the trust element. If you choose to run Facebook ads, that's fine. One, it's going to be an easy three to $5,000 a month, at least, that you minimum that you have to spend, right? Followed by, it's not the most, it doesn't amount to anything over time. You could spend 3k this month, 3k next month, 3k the month after that, and you will get some sales, but it doesn't build anything. If you stop doing ads, you stop making money. It's not the same with influencers, because you're building relationships. The ocean, the sales are just a side effect. So, what you're building is good relationships with people who have influence over your potential customers. You could launch another product tomorrow, you could change up your recipe or something, or you know, you could do anything, and you still have those relationships or friendships with these people that you can leverage into more marketing for yourself later on. So, your time invested in investment and influencer actually compounds over time into something much bigger and better, and you're actually building something, even if you put money into it. So, yeah, that's why you should go for influencer.

Sari 8:30
A lot of good reasons there. I do agree with you that when we look at kind of marketing tactics, and if you were to weigh them by, you know, their I guess, effectiveness, and you know, if some are like really useful, I do think having other people talk about you. I mean, just think about, you know, for anybody listening, like if you've been to an amazing restaurant, you had a really great experience, you know, you're going to want to talk to people about it, you want to share it, and they're going to be so much more likely to go and do the same thing, so like, oh, so and so said that, and then if they see it and hear it from multiple people, like you're like, I apparently have to do this because I keep hearing about it.

Sari 9:12
So yeah, I do think rather than just seeing that one Facebook ad, which I think you got to see it a lot, which is why the, you know, I mean, I tell people all the time, like, please stop boosting posts for a couple $100 like, that does nothing for you, so you're just burning your money, please stop doing that. If you're going to do Facebook meta ads, do it very strategically, but it's going to be a little more, lot more expensive than maybe you think, and to do it right, and you got to, you know, have a lot of sales there to justify that, and the leads may not be as, I don't know, I guess, as quality leads.

Yash 9:56
With Facebook, you also kind of target more impulse purchasers. So people who are, who just think maybe your product is cool and want to test it out, versus with something like an influencer, you would get what we've seen across our brands, that's are all is the customers that you get are much more higher quality when they come from a referral or an influencer, basically, versus if they come from a cold channel like Facebook, if you see an ad, you might buy something, might not buy it again. If someone recommends something, and you buy it because, like you said, Sari, three people recommended it on socials, and you're like, I have to buy this now, and you buy it, you're very likely to buy it again, because you bought it after carefully considering the opinions of three people that you follow, that you admire versus like just you know, impulse buying something off of a Facebook ad, so yeah, I think it's way higher quality customers.

Sari 10:51
Yeah, and they come from a place of referral and trust, and I know, you know, when people come to my program, same thing, it's like if they've been referred and somebody else is telling them how great it is, like they're more likely to join and stick around, so I do think that holds true. And then I love what you were talking about, kind of taking it further to relationship building. I think sometimes that idea gets lost a lot for people, they're just so focused on their product, and I will tell you, you know, I've had hosted panel discussions with buyers, and you know, people in all walks of this industry, and I think everyone will tell you, this is about relationships, like your success is based on your ability to build trustworthy, high integrity relationships that last over time, and this is just one avenue to start building relationships, because you don't know, like you could start here with a couple people, but then down the line you don't know, maybe you help them somehow, they help you, like it's pretty cool the way these things can develop, but you got to go start yourself out there.

Yash 12:03
A 100%. Yeah. And then you have to almost be friends with your influencers. In the early days, is what we've seen. We've also studied some brands, like some bigger brands, such as, say, Pura Vida, for example. They went to lunch with all their creators, right, just to get to know them, just to understand where they're coming from, and so on, and what's important to your creators, because every industry is different, like a skincare influencer cares about the different things than a fitness influencer, for example, right? So, you have to understand where they're coming from, and you don't have to take everybody to lunch, but you could do a quick phone call with them, you could put them in some sort of a WhatsApp or a Slack group, for example, and then just, you know, build a sense of community and friendship with them, and that goes a long way, both in terms of giving you insight into how people, how influencers think, so you can modify your influencer approach that way, and also, in general, like you said, it's important to have those relationships, because it might not lead to sales, but it might lead into some other bigger partnership with a brand or a retailer or something like that, so yeah, and then we've also seen some brands work with creators in the in the early days, and then eventually ended up partnering with them almost on an equity basis, like getting the creator on as a partner, because they have so many followers, your marketing is basically forever sold for, so yeah.

Sari 13:20
Yeah, there's.. we just have no idea how these things unfold, but you got to start somewhere, and you got to start building these relationships, because it, like you said, it amplifies.. it's not just me trying to reach one person, one person, it's like a bigger lever I can pull that's going to get me access to a lot of people who are already aligned in some way with the mission of my product, and I think maybe sometimes the fear when people hear influencers, they're thinking of, like you said, the big, you know, the TV, or you know, like the obviously the one that comes to mind is like Kardashians, in my mind, anyway, right, as like, you know, a million dollars for a post or whatever ridiculousness, and we're not talking about those. We're talking about this isn't about like buying somebody's approval, you know, their stamp of approval. It is really about here's my product, and you're aligned with it because you're, you know you have a platform where you're talking to moms, busy moms who want to help feed their kids better nutritious food, right? And then you're sending them your product, and these are like micro influencers, these aren't people necessarily with 50,000 followers, right?

Yash 14:37
A 100%, yeah. I mean, the Kardashians actually backfire, so to tell you a funny story about that, that model just does not work anymore. So, what people see through it, right? So, I think there's this vegan meat company called Yak, I think there's Beyond Meat, or someone, so one of these like vegan meat companies collaborated with Kim Kardashian, and they made her. Like the I don't like the advisor or something like that, like they gave her some title and they shot an ad with her kind of taking a bite of the burger, but then it was so fake, like even the bite was fake, so it didn't look like she actually bit into the burger, and then people started roasting them in the YouTube comment section, saying this is so fake, and so on. On the other hand, if they collaborated with some, like vegan fitness influencers, or vegan athletes, for example, who actually eat the meat, Kim Kardashian, maybe does not, is not vegan, like, who knows, right? So, like, making her an ambassador doesn't make sense. So, if you actually partnered with an influencer who's maybe smaller, or a bunch of influencers, or smaller, and they would actually eat your meat and promote it, and you know, you'd have better results, so that Kardashian stuff totally backfires. But, yeah, like you said, partner with, yeah, it's very inauthentic. But what small brands should do is just partner with other extremely small creators, even if they have two, 3000 followers, as long as they're basically people just like you with their own jobs, maybe they have their own, like, you know, like side hustle or brand that they're building, but as long as you can come in and affect another area of their life, and they can, you know, they feel comfortable enough to talk about you, you can partner with them, so it doesn't matter if they have 2,000 or 10,000 followers, no matter how small they are, I think you just need good partners, because again, remember that these people will grow. You need to have a slightly more longer term mindset. Here, in a year, the person at the Mommy blogger at 2000 followers might be at 20,000 followers, right? In a year from then, should be 100,000 followers, right? So, then that partnership that you had at the early days, really, you know, kicks in when you know she's actually at the 20k, 50k follower mark.

Sari 16:47
I love that. I think I just want to put a double click on that. Is that, and I see that in my membership, where people, you know, two years ago started small, you know, they were smaller, and as they've grown together, they're all working together to partner and collaborate and help each other, and it's so cool, like, yeah, if you kind of get in with maybe you know around your level of people, don't try to aim for, yeah, the 50,000 followers, but like find people who are, you know, more starting out as well, and then you guys can grow together, and it's a very symbiotic relationship. Yeah, I love that.

Yash 17:27
Yes, yep.

Sari 17:28
And before I move on to like next steps, let me just ask you too to clarify, because I know this came up in the Fuel VIP call too.

Yash 17:36
Yeah.

Sari 17:37
What do you consider an influencer, meaning I know we talked about affiliates, like, are those influencers like people who buy your product versus, you know, somebody maybe you're like on social media, or let's not forget YouTube as well, right? Some great influencers over there. So, how do you kind of define the bucket, or do you divide it into sub-buckets? What does that look like for you.

Yash 18:01
Yeah, good question. The way I would define an influencer is go to the root of the word influence, so who has influence over your target customer? That person's an influencer for you. So an influencer might be one of your customers, actually, who has, who's like a local machine, or let's say, like, let's stick to the example of the new good nutrition for busy mothers, right? Maybe you're one of your customers runs a local meetup group where 25 moms kind of get together once a month, and they share their struggles and stories and have fun, or whatever. That person, even if she only knows 25 other people like her, still an influencer for you, right? Maybe she has zero social media, that's still an influencer, because they can influence other potential target customers, right? So, as long as they have influence over your target customers, they're an influencer. So, I would abstract away all of, like, the norms of Instagram, TikTok, nano, micro, mega, all of those like buzzwords that you keep, see, keep seeing. I would just say, as long as they have influence on whom you want to target, they are an influencer for you, and you should work with them.

Sari 19:10
Okay, so I'm a, you know, early stage brand, don't have huge budget. I heard Sari that I should stop putting lighting my money on fire by boosting posts and what, yeah, what are some next steps that I could take? I'm convinced influencers are a good way to start in 2024. What are my next steps to get started?

Yash 19:34
Yeah, so we, that's a good question. We actually came up with a, like I said, I used to run an agency, so we came up with a six step system back then, which I can, I can share quickly, like what those six steps are. So step one is just start finding influencers, go on Instagram, or you could use Seral tools like Seral for that, but we can dive into that. You can just go and be scrappy, right? I don't want to, you don't have, you don't actually need any tools just to get your first five or six influencers go on Instagram, search for your, let's say, if we stick to the same example, healthy nutrition for babies, like search for that hashtag, for example, or hashtag busy mom, right, something like that, search for that, find which influencers are posting about the topics that your target customer is interested in, make a list of maybe 25 to 50 people in that niche, and then you can put it in a spreadsheet, and then, yeah, from there,

Sari 20:26
And you could do TikTok too, and YouTube, or also.

Yash 20:30
I would say, step one, stick to Instagram, because Instagram is a good sweet spot, between TikTok is really good for views, YouTube tends to be slightly more slower when it comes to actually getting influencers to push with longer videos. Instagram is like a good sweet spot. So, I would stick with Instagram as a platform if someone's new and starting off. So, yeah, I find like 2550 influencers, ideally 50 influencers, because that's a good starting point. Once you have a list, you've seen 50 profiles that you know are good for your market, then you can move on to step two, which is creating a compelling creator offer, so this is what we covered in the fuel VIP call, and this is what you need to do. So, if you're in the group, go watch that session, but to give you a quick brief of what that is, basically you need to create an incentive for the creator. This might be a free product, this might be affiliate commissions, this might be, you know, anything that payment also, if you can afford that, but you don't have to do payment. Basically, a compelling creator offers three parts. There is incentive, which could be all of the things that I said. It involves a discount for their audience, so it's like if somebody wants to buy from the influencer, they should get some sort of a perk with it. So that's a discount, followed by you need to have some sort of a pork for the influencer, so if you're offer some sort of a special gift or some community or something special like that that the influencer gets as part of working with you, right. So have these three things as part of your offer. Finding those first shifting fluencers in step one helps you really understand who you're marketing to, or whom you're, you need to sell the influencer first on selling your product, right? So it, you, it helps with that understanding. Step one, step two, you create the offer, and then you move on to step three, which is outreach, right? So you reach out to them, you can DM them, ideally I prefer emailing them, because that's more formal, it's more businessy. People who want influencers who want to work with brands tend to have their emails publicly available, so you can email them or DM them, and then figure out, like, get in touch with them, figure out what they want, and then just offer to send them a free product. Just say, like, hey, no commitment, we just want to send you a free product, because we like your profile. I see that you're a busy mom who really cares about her children's nutrition. You already post about it. Why did I send you my, you know, my healthy cereal that I've made for children? And then I'm happy to, you know, work out a partnership if you like it. And then very likely, most creators, especially if you write things like we are a small brand, we're a new brand, or I'm a solo founder. People tend to reciprocate to that, even if it's slightly bigger influencers. They like the fact that somebody is hustling and trying to build something up for themselves, so they will respond to you. So, don't hesitate to reach out to even people at 5k 10k followers, right? So, reach out to them, send them free product, which actually brings me to step four, which is shipping free product. Make sure you don't send it in a boring old cardboard box. See if you can gift wrap it, see if you can add some sort of, you know, handwritten note or personalize it somehow. Add some sort of a special gift for them. Personalizing the shipping experience is really important with influencers, because it really helps you get more for it, helps you get more posts for the number of boxes that you would send, so that is step four, is shipping the product out. Then step five is once you ship the product, you need to track performance, you need to see, hey, who's posting about us, how much sales is it driving, and so on. And you can create coupon codes on your Shopify, and so on, to track all of this. That is step five. And steps, if you just do steps one through five. You've done most of what's needed for influencer marketing to work, but step six is what defines good to great. The step six is relationship building, which we also emphasized in the earlier part of the podcast. So build relationships, get their phone numbers, add them to a WhatsApp group, grab coffee with them if you live around where they live, right? So very good relationships, and then keep doing this step one through six process again and again every week, every month, reach out to 50 new creators on a weekly basis, and then eventually that compounds into something meaningful. So I know exactly long answer to your question, Sari, but basically they need to find people, they need to make a good, compelling creator offer, reach out to them, personalize the shipping experience, track who's working, and build relationships with those people, and then repeat this process on a consistent basis, maybe once a week, maybe twice a month, something like that, and then keep building that base of relationships.

Sari 24:55
I love this, I, you know, I love concrete steps, to give people action, and here's exactly what you do, and when you do it, and in what order. And I would love to offer this PDF at no charge. Get a free download by going to foodbizsuccess.com/saral. We'll put the link in the show notes as well. I feel like this is really doable, and it's something that's just going to require a spreadsheet and some time on your part to start this process. It's consistency over intensity, right? Even if it's only even if you only have time to reach out to five a week, if you could do that every week, you know, over time, like you said, it's going to compound and start getting responses, but I think sometimes people are like, I'm going to do 50, and then they sit down and they don't usually get to 50 anyway, because it's too much. Then they get super busy, and then they don't pay attention to responses, and it's too hard to keep up with. So, consistency over intensity is really important.

Yash 25:58
100%. Yeah, I said 25 to 50, but if you can't do that on a consistent basis, go over, go to like it's just like anything else in life. If you want to take your fitness seriously, you can. Don't go to the gym for one straight week and then never visit the gym again. Go for two days in a week and continue going two days in a week until you can increase from there, right, so consistency matters a lot with influencers.

Sari 26:24
It does, and that you can manage and keep up with correspondence, and that kind of thing, because you never know. Sometimes it, you know, when it rains, it pours. So, making sure, yeah, you don't like overwhelm yourself too much, too. Okay, so they have that six step process, which is very doable. Saral, I just do want to do a plug for you. I know you're like, "I don't want to push it". But I love this program, and I have some founders signing up with you, which is so great. We have a special offer for people listening to the podcast, but Saral basically is a platform that is a subscription, and it helps you manage all, like, keeps everything in one place, and all of that. So, probably a good place to go where we talk about mistakes, because I'm sure Saral can help people avoid some of the mistakes. So, we're not doing a super big plug, of course, for Saral, but I do want to mention it, because it can be a big time saver, right? Sometimes we have a lot of time, but sometimes we invest in some automations. It can save us a lot of time.

Yash 27:29
Yeah, so Saral, we will help bring consistency to the process and help you do it at scale. So, if you're able to reach out to five people a week yourself, you'll be able to reach out to 50 or 100 people in the same time investment, so it's leverage on your time, right? So, if you want to take things to the next level, you can get on something like a Saral, and all the six steps that I shared are basically sections in Saral, where you can find, you can reach out, you can manage, you can measure performance, and build relationships, and so on. So that's how that's how Seral works.

Sari 28:00
Brings everything together and kind of gets you off of this clunky spreadsheet.

Yash 28:04
Yes.

Sari 28:05
So let's talk about mistakes. What are some of the common mistakes everybody likes to know? What do I not do? Do I avoid these mistakes? So what are some things you see?

Yash 28:14
Yeah, I think especially at the early stage, just the thread of relationships is so critical, most brands, right? Most big brands get it, so they're like they've been through the process, right? They understand how it is. This is about relationships and being long term about it. It's not a channel that's going to get you sales next month, right? So, if you're looking to get that, probably spending money on Facebook is a good idea, because it's money and money out, right? Is that kind of a channel relationships, by definition, take a longer time to build, so have at least a three months timeframe in your own mind, saying, "Hey, I'm committing to this for three months, I'm going to do it consistently. If it doesn't work, that's fine, it's a failed experiment, but very likely, if you commit to it and do all the right actions, it's going to work. There's no way that you reach out to people who are in your niche, who want your product, will any way, anyway, be customers, and then they don't talk about you, right? Doesn't work that way. So be consistent, and have at least three month long time frame to test it out, and be consistent with it before you kind of call it quits, if at all. So that's that. And then stop being transactional about it, would be number two. So it's like, don't expect sales, because just because they posted about you once, it's not going to get you sales. They need to keep posting about you again and again and again, at least for a few times, for the audience to fully buy into your product, right? When was the last time you yourself bought a product because one influencer spoke about it once on their channel? Probably never, right? You need multiple. You either need to see five different influencers talk about it, or you want the same influencer to talk about it five times before you're like, hmm, this seems really legit, right? I'm going to test it out, I'm going to make a purchase, right? So you want to build that long term.

Sari 29:56
We always set at Whole Foods, like I think the was even the science was somebody has to see a message 10 times before they really like internalize it, so all that signage you see at a store, and all the, you know, as you're rolling through Instagram, yeah, you do have to see it more than once. 

Yash
A hundred percent. So have that kind of non-transactional relationship focused view of things. So it's like they don't either post about you once, not going to get you the most number in sales, that's fine. Keep working with them, keep nurturing that relationship, send them another product, and then eventually their audience will fully buy into your brand, and they're going to buy either, if not immediately, then someday in the future they will definitely make a purchase. So those are like two things, just being too short term about it, have at least a three months time frame, don't be like I need sales tomorrow, and then have a more relationship first frame and I think another similar thing that comes to mind about mistakes that we kind of touched upon is there's a difference between popularity and influence, so Kim Kardashian is popular, I don't think she has a lot of influence on on the people that follow her, but your local, like your mommy blogger with 3000 followers, not as popular as Kim Kardashian, but has a lot of influence amongst all the other moms that follow her, right, for advice and so on, right, a nutritionist on Instagram with 9000 followers has way more influence than a celebrity endorsing your supplement, for example, right? So think about influence. Don't focus too much on popularity. I think one of the mistakes I see people make is like I'm going to reach out to all the people with 1.5 million. If you've seen it with some like a Saral customer comes to mind, they reach out to people with more than 100,000 followers, and they reach out to like 100 of them, and then I was on a call with the person, with the founder, and he said not many people got back, and even if they got back, they all just said pricing, influencer marketing doesn't work. I was, and then I looked at the profiles that he had on his account, and it was all everybody with 150k, 130k like, did you filter by the 100k followers plus, and he was like, "yes". You don't do that, right? Those people are not, they're popular, they're not influential for you right now, right? You're a smaller brand, if you are athletic greens, sure, reach out to them, because you're at, like, Sari, you also alluded to this, like, reach out to people at your level, right? So, if you're a smaller brand, reach out to small creators, and that's exactly what this founder did, and then he started seeing results, and people, you know, receiving free product, posting about it, and so on. So, focus on influence, don't focus on popularity. So, those are those are kind of like the three mistakes that come to mind for me.

Sari
So, that's so good. Yeah, really great, really great tips there. What's a good case study that you like to refer to, especially in like the food or beverage space that that you've worked with?

Yash
Yeah, we did. So, there's a bunch of good brands. If I were to name some, there's slightly bigger, but there's Obvi, who uses us, somebody, they're pretty popular in this space. Obviously, it's a collagen brand, so they're collagen protein brand. They use us. If I were to use a slightly more smaller, there is this brand called Neutratology, based in Canada, that uses us. They were super new, and then they started doing it. They were kind of doing the spreadsheet stuff for about a month, and then they realized this does not scale at all. We need a platform to do it, so they came on board, and then now they have more than 100 influencers in the, they've been on for about three or four months, more than 100 influencers promoting them. I just spoke to the founder. She told me almost we're like a flywheel of creators, so now influencers are actually reaching out to them because they see other influencers promoting their products. It's like it's good, right? So now I start seeing inbound interest from influencers versus before I was kind of reaching out to them, seeking them out.

Sari
Yeah, that's when you know it's working right. Start asking you. I love that.

Yash
Yeah, I think one our best case studies, in terms of early, really early, your new tritology was kind of, they had a brand, they were not super, super early. One of our brands called, they sell plushie toys, and then this guy was pre-launch, is when he reached out, he DM'd me on Twitter, actually, and he's like, I want to work with influencers, like, cool, so I just gave him free access to the tool for a month, actually, and because they were so new, did not have any budget at all, like, fine, man, use it, and following my own advice of giving value first, right, and like you. Use it, and then I consulted with him a little bit, and then he got 50 or so influencers signed within a month of outreach from using Seral, and then he made 22k on day one of sales, and what he did was he kind of, I mean, the platform is fine, and that's cool, but he ought to look at the strategy, right, he got 35 of, I mean, he got commitments for everybody, but 35 of the 50 influencers that he onboarded actually ended up posting about him on day one of launch. So he'd sent them all product, and he's like, 'hey, we're launching on this day, almost treating. He's friends with everybody, everyone's in a WhatsApp group. He's like, 'hey, we are launching on x date, x time. Make sure you're, you have your posts ready, your reels ready to go, and everybody push the content out, and they're in like this very niche kind of anime community, so everybody kind of follows the creators in the space. So, if 35 people post about something on the same day, it's like, whoa, this brand is everywhere.

Sari
Yeah.

Yash
And then this guy made like $22,000 on in on day one of launch, and his launch week was something like close to 28k so he was really, really successful. So that was like the three stages, so obvious, really, really huge new tritology slide, you know, a couple years old, and then this guy was just pre-launched, and he launched with influencers, and now all he does is influencer, all he does is like he does a drop of these plushie toys with influencers, he gets the money, buys poor inventory, gets more influencers, does another bigger drop, and that's his model now.

Sari
I love it, and like I said, you build that ongoing relationship and they get excited, and it's fun, makes, yeah, it's a lot more fun than, like, let me run a Facebook.

Yash
Yes, is it taking on Facebook.

Sari
Exactly. Well, we do have a special offer, and I'll put the link in the show notes where you get to try out Saral for 14 days, and you get a personal onboarding call and customize onboarding, so that Yash and his team can really help you be successful, so this is something you're like, I might want to try this out for 2024. Definitely grab my link, and that way you get this special offer that will be really useful for you.

Yash
So, whoever clicks on the link in the show notes gets a special, so the default trial is seven days, but you get a SARI special 14 day trial of Seral, so you'll get it for free. Plus, we'll do onboarding calls with you, so we'll teach you how to use the platform, give you best practices, specifically. I mean, thank you if you've listened to the podcast so far, but then obviously every brand is a little bit different, and you'll have questions, so we'll answer all your questions, and then we'll help set you up. We'll do multiple calls with you, and make sure that you succeed as influencers. So, yeah, that's the Sari benefit.

Sari
I love it. It's very special, and I love it. Yeah, we're aligned on leading with generosity and getting value ahead of time, and it's a great platform. So, well, this has been a great conversation. Hopefully, people have some good takeaways, some food for thought to think about as they're putting together their, their marketing plan, and you know, whatever budget that looks like. You know, of course, this does require time to do the work, but also, you know, your cost of goods sold, like you said, in sending out free product, and the shipping, of course, but I think if you looked at the ROI on that, right, the return on investment, I think you would find, and I know, and I know Seral helps you track that as well, so it's important that when you do these kind of things, I should say that you know to wrap up, like, make sure any, any strategies that you're trying, that you do have tools to measure their success. I think a lot of people just try something for a little bit, don't measure it, and then make a conclusion, but actually track it and see how much money you're putting into it, but I do think that the cost, you know, could be very worth it with the amplification of influencers, certainly more than trying to, you know, one to one by a long shot.

Yash
Yeah, 100%. I'll drop a stat there, and we probably need to update these numbers because they're better. But a couple of months back, we did an analysis of the ROI that people are seeing on the average brand on Seral, including the brands with zero ROI, because they're new, is 3.59x so that's just the average across the board, and if I only consider the brands that have been on Seral for more than four or five months, which means they have slightly more mature programs. The average ROIacross those brands is 8.11x So, if you just start, you're new to it, very likely you'll get a this Facebook ROI right now. Average is pretty bad, it's like 1.5 to 2.5 hardly. So, you'll get a 3.59 which are all on ads. Average, so you do better than average, you'll obviously do better than that. And then, if you stick to it, then the ROI is just like insane.

Sari
And that just means for people are like, what are we talking about? It just means for every dollar you put in for Facebook, you might get 1.5 you know, $1.50 back versus getting eight back. And I bet a lot of people, then also, even if they don't buy right away, maybe they get on your email list, and then you can use email strategies to then you know, connect, keep connecting with them, and so I think you could see long-term benefit, where now once you get a customer, you get people on your mailing list, then you can nurture that with your own email sequence, which has a huge, you know, 41 ROI. This is a good strategy, a good partnership. So, thank you, Yash, so much for being on the Food Business Success Podcast. It was so great to really give listeners an overview of what influencer marketing is, what your six concrete next steps are, and you can go get that free download at foodbizsuccess.com/saral, and I'll also put the link in the show notes, and of course, the mistakes that you want to avoid. This was such a great conversation, Yash.

Yash
It was lovely to be on your show and doing the call. Happy to do more anytime you want.

Sari
And, of course, if you are a member inside Fuel, go watch the call that we did with Yash, all about case studies and how to create a compelling offer. It was in October of the VIP call. I really do believe that influencer marketing is one of the lowest budget ways and highest performing ways, and frankly one of the most fun ways that you can set yourself apart as a brand and get noticed and start leveraging relationships to create know, like, and trust factors with people who want your products. Until next time, have an amazing week.

Sari
The smartest thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to invest in a who to help you with the how to speed up your journey and help you skip the line. When you are ready for more support and accountability to finally get this thing done. You can work with me in two ways: get me all to yourself with one on one business coaching, or join Food Business Success, which includes membership inside Fuel, our community of food business founders, that includes monthly live group coaching calls, and so much more. It's one of my favorite places to hang out, and I would love to see you there. Go to foodbizsuccess.com to start your journey towards your own food business success.