Hey, I'm Sam Betesh. I've been in the influencer marketing space for 9 years, mostly helping startups figure out how to design influencer marketing strategies to meet aggressive customer acquisition cost goals. To date I've helped over a dozen brands spend over $5m and drive more than $30m in sales.
Influencer marketing is fundamentally a game of arbitrage (finding cheap “ad space” and monetizing it well). But now that everyone’s doing it, influencers are getting expensive. Through scraping and using a few different tools, I’ve put together a database of over 300,000 influencers that range from 10,000-10 million followers on YouTube, Instagram, and podcasts, allowing me to continue finding a huge number of underpriced influencers.
Micro-influencers (ignore the follower counts that get thrown around; my definition of micro-influencers are people that will accept product for promotion and drive positive ROI) are by far the highest ROI segment of influencers today. You can’t rely on only micro influencers due to lack of achievable scale, but no doubt they are by far the lowest hanging fruit in terms of high-ROI influencer marketing tactics, and I’ve developed ways to work with 1,000+ per month.
Influencer-based ads are a new type of Facebook ad that outperforms almost every single other type of ad you could create. I’m not going to go into much detail here, but I’ll just tease that Hush, Grove Collaborative, and Thrive Market spend $500K+/month on marketing, and they spend it almost exclusively on this channel because it performs better than anything else. And just as important, it scales.