Influencer Marketer with Sharyn Smith

James Lawrence 

Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer Podcast. I am here today with Sharon Smith. Sharon, welcome to the pod. 

Sharon Smith

Hello. 

James Lawrence.

It's good to have you here. So, Sharon is the founder and CEO of Social Soup, Australia's largest influencer marketing company, working with brands like Audi, Lego, L'Oreal, Phillips, Huggies, Weet-Bix and many more. She's also Co-Founder and executive director of the Influence Group and also chair of AIMCo, which is the Australian Influencer Marketing Council. So when I thought influencer marketing, Sharon, I thought of you to get you onto the pod to discuss kind of where we're at in 2023. So welcome, Sharon, and really looking forward to today's discussion. 

Sharyn Smith 

Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. 

James Lawrence 

Good. I thought just start from the absolute top. What is influencer marketing? 

Sharyn Smith 

Good question. Start from the beginning. Well, if we take it back a step, what is influence? And influence is about having the ability to impact someone in terms of their behavior or their attitude. So it's some sort of impact. And really influencer marketing sort of has evolved over time. When I first got into the industry, it was called word of mouth marketing. And it was really about engaging people in real life to try products and see them to market. We had the evolution of the industry over time in terms of when social platforms come into play and we saw more the visibility of connections. We had a brief phase where the industry was called viral marketing, where everyone wanted their brand to go viral. And then as this kind of creator economy, creator ecosystem has exploded, probably more so with, I'd say Instagram, and now we've got the juggernaut of TikTok… So we've had this amazing sort of economy of people that are creating content and being able to create these sort of niche up to massive audiences. And so really, influencer marketing is about finding people who can influence your audience and involving them in your marketing activities. 

James Lawrence 

It's a really good summary. Is it synonymous with Instagram, TikTok, or is still some of those tactics that might have worked pre kind of social media? Are they still in effect? Like, are there other channels or areas where influencer marketing is playing? Because I think. If you ask the average marketer, what is influencer marketing? I think most would say it's Instagram, it's TikTok. Like, is it broader than that still?

Sharyn Smith 

Yeah. And I think it's also probably suffers from a bit of a stigma where people have this kind of stereotyped view of what an influencer is. 

James Lawrence 

Everyone's an influencer. 

Sharyn Smith 

Yeah, because we've got big influence as like, Kim Kardashian and you've got mainstream media really likes to sort of report on some sensationalized stories. So I think sometimes we have this kind of stereotypical view of what an influencer is. But I think, to your point, really, everyone has influence. And I think where we are today and what we sort of focus on, certainly in my business, Social Soup and the influence group, is getting people to think beyond the influencer and think about influence. And as you said, that could be anyone. So it could be your customer, it could be a review that someone reads, it could be someone that someone's following on TikTok that they don't know. So, there's all these types of influencers and there's all these types of moments that influence people. So I do think we are moving beyond just that sort of very simple view of influencer marketing to really think there's this holistic ecosystem of influencers around us.

James Lawrence 

Because I think that's right. I think it's almost kind of tactical, isn't it? If you think of influencer marketing as it's how do we get our product into the hands of some influencers on Instagram and get them to say something nice? How do you kind of elevate the conversation when you're going in to speak to a prospective client or a client to kind of say, hey, let's take a step back and look at influence more broadly within your business? 

Sharyn Smith 

I think we sometimes get blinded by, oh, we really love those influences, we want those people to be holding our brand. But if we take a step back, the foundations or fundamentals of marketing, which is who are we trying to influence? Right? And if we can then really understand what influences them and what are the sorts of journeys,orthe many myriads of journeys that people can now go on to buy products which could be a very short to a very long journey depending on our category or product lifecycle, and really being able to sort of take stock of the different moments that people might have in that journey. And once we do that, and we actually have a tool that we use, that we've just actually launched last week called an Influence Audit, which is exactly something we've put in place to help have that conversation, which is really taking a big segment of the population. So we might say a sample of 1000 people who have recently bought that brand or bought in that category and actually taking them on a very detailed journey of how they got there. Which really helps us map influencers on that. Because if you think about, right, the tool that we use at the moment, which is a very blunt instrument, and we have it on the end of our websites or things like that, like, how did you come to buy this product? It might be word of mouth, might be advertising, but it's never one of those things, is it? It’s any things. And a tool like that can never capture how somebody really came to be your customer. 

James Lawrence 

Yeah, correct. And we'll often find that at Rocket, where, as with so many businesses, word of mouth is  the best form of marketing, right? But we obviously do a lot of other marketing with the podcast and we try to practice what we preach and do Google or whatever else. And often it is that it's multi touch, right? It’s B2B. It's not the most complex B2B purchase, but it's still a spaghetti bowl. Right? In terms of people that might have worked with you previously or someone's partner worked with you and they might have also found you through Google or Awards. 

Sharyn Smith 

And I think often that marketers have kind of ignored that or put it to the side because they're like, oh, we can't do anything about that other than have a great product, so let's look at all the things that we can pay for. But if you actually do really investigate or really try and understand, there's many different triggers and types of word of mouth and motivations and sources. So you're ignoring over half of the influence out there. So I think really understanding how true advocacy and word of mouth happens is really important. 

James Lawrence 

Yeah. Where do you come in? Because business might have a digital budget and within that, looking at Google Ads and SEO and whatever else, social, paid social, they'll be doing organic and they might have a program around email marketing and then they'll have above the line. Do you specifically get brought in as that channel that is word of mouth/referral or you're coming in more strategically above that and then kind of how influence works across all of a business's channels? 

Sharyn Smith 

Yeah, it really varies, obviously depending on the client and the way that they work. Certainly it works best when it is integrated. It is part of the strategy, the plan. And this is really understanding how you drive participation with your brand. And really we're sort of at what we call when we're activating, where it's the social influence strategy. So really understanding how if you think about creators and activating influencers through all touch points, all content types that they might generate are very important. So we might be working with everyday people and the goal might be generating and populating reviews, right? Because we know how important reviews are, but often they're difficult to get. They're certainly difficult to get consistently. So if there's an authentic way that we can be giving people experiences with products and generating reviews, well, that can be really important. Likewise with any sort of influence or content creation campaigns, what we do with the content is as important as actually what we do in the campaign with the influencers. So there's only so much organic reach that we're getting these days. But actually, what are we doing with that content in paid? What are we doing with that in sort of owned channels? So really it should be incredibly integrated into everything that the brand's doing, otherwise missing the benefits 

James Lawrence 

Makes sense. Are there certain segments, certain industry types, where what you do works better? Is it more B2 C skewed? B2B? Does it work? What are the different challenges there? Are we talking more FMCG? Are there kind of areas where it does lend itself more to?

Sharyn Smith 

I think it really lends itself to every area, but definitely there's easier categories to activate than others. If you think B2B, it's not that sort of easy, accessible ecosystem of influencers out there. So it is harder, but certainly very achievable to understand social influence. But there's different sort of buying processes there, I'd say. So definitely the influencer industry focuses a lot more on B2C. And again, because you have access to the platforms, we have a lot of visibility on data and performance. So you've kind of got that as a sort of how you can align your measurement frameworks around that. So obviously, if you can measure it, then it makes it easier to do, prove that you can get the budgets for it. But we work across every category. There probably isn't a B2C category that we haven't worked in. I'd say there's more investment going into, certainly into FMCG… beauty… we do a lot of work within pets, any sort of pet products… finance. And again, there's a lot of regulations coming into play with finance as well. So fin-fluences. You've got to be up to date with everything that you're doing in that space. A lot of health products. But again, you've got to know what you're doing because the Therapeutic Good Act has now come into play and there's very specific requirements how influencers can act within those highly regulated industries. 

James Lawrence 

That segues beautifully into my next question. I wanted to get you to talk just about regulatory changes that have kind of come in recently that will impact things moving forward and maybe just taking up a pretty elevated view of that, just in terms of, I presume that listeners to the pod, some will be aware of them, some won't. So maybe just what the changes are, what they're intended to do and I guess the do's and the don'ts. 

Sharyn Smith 

Sure. Well, I think in the last twelve months influencer marketing got the attention of pretty much every regulator. 

James Lawrence 

It's been a busy period. 

Sharyn Smith 

There's been a lot of heat on the industry, but I think that's a good thing. I say as an industry, we've just gone through our difficult teenage years where not everyone's followed by the rules they've pushed back where there hasn't been a lot of consistency. So I think having regulation in place really builds trust in the industry andsort of weeds out the bad actors out there. So in terms of the different types of regulation, probably the biggest one that's had the biggest impact on the industry, I'd say, is around disclosure. C classifying commercial content. And there was a lot of gray areas in that, and there was a lot of sort of; do I have to disclose if I'm just gifted it? Do I have to disclose if I'm going to an event? We kind of really look at all the different edge cases around that. 

Sharyn Smith

So ad standards have been looking at that part of the AANA, the Australian Association of National Advertisers. So that's a self regulatory framework. And so when consumers are complaining of out an ad, that TV ad offended me - they can also complain about anything in social media as well. So ad standards, which is kind of like the clearing body of all of those complaints, handles those and they have had hundreds in the last couple of years to be sort of adjudicating and caught them. And I was just going to say that on top of that, the ACCC is now - they've just announced sort of last year that they're going to be having a big digital platforms review and as part of that digital platforms review they are investigating influencer marketing. So there is a report due in the next week on that. So ACCC, obviously they handle consumer law. So consumer law is about where advertising can't be seen as misleading. So that's where undisclosed or nondisclosed commercial content falls into ‘misleading’. So ACCC obviously coming into play is where fines can be handed out to brands and to influencers if they are seen to be engaging in misleading conduct. So I think we will see some fines and that's where we will see some everybody being whipped into shape, I think and really wanting to know exactly what all the regulations are.

James Lawrence 

In terms of super simple - and I know that a lot of things at the edges are kind of gray and unresolved- but fundamentally, if I'm an in-house marketing manager and I'm running influencer programs, if I'm paying for that piece of promotion, then it should be disclosed that it is a paid promotion. Would you agree with that?

Sharyn Smith 

I think it comes down to ‘what is paying for something’. Anything that has a value is payment. So if I'm just giving that product to an influencer, that's still payment. If I am inviting them to an event, that is still payment. So we have an arrangement, even if I'm not telling them what to post and I'm just giving them a product, right? You still have some sort of contract with them because you've been in contact with them, you've sent them a product. So all of those things should be considered the same. You are paying them, you have some sort of commercial agreement with them and what you need to do is have that correctly disclosed. 

Sharyn Smith

So the way to do that, of course, first and foremost is to use the paid partnership or the sponsorship tags which are in all the platforms. Now, that's where you see at the top of Instagram post where it's like paid partnership with specific brand. And actually the platforms themselves require that. So if influencers aren't using that, then they can actually be in breach of the platform and the platforms can take them down. So they're designed to be correctly disclosed and very visible. So first and foremost, that should be used. Then we also encourage #ad. So this is where probably a couple of years ago, things like #sp crept in, where people are like, well, if we say SP, that means people know that that means sponsored, doesn't it? So no, they don't. So really, again, making it clear it's #paidpartnership, #ad and also best practices to have that above the fold so people don't have to scroll to the end of a whole page of hashtags to see it.

James Lawrence 

Do you have any information or I guess opinion on; does having to disclose the partnership as a paid one, do you think that erodes the credibility of the post or do you think it boosts the credibility, like any kind of anecdotal feedback on that? 

Sharyn Smith 

Look, there's a lot of discussion around this in terms does it affect the performance of the post? Coming about a year ago, I saw some analysis on content that had #sponsored versus non sponsored content. And actually what we saw was better performance of the sponsored content. So I don't think the platform's doing that. It's not in the algorithm making that sponsored content more visible. But I do think what's potentially happening there is influencers and creators might be putting a bit more effort into that content that they're getting paid for. So therefore it was getting higher engagement rates. There is discussions around whether that paid partnership tag has been impacting performance of content. But again, I don't think it's the paid partnership tag itself. It'll be about the content that the creators or influencers are creating.

James Lawrence 

Speaking I guess specifically about social media influencers and probably more what the average person thinks when you say influencer… what would be your advice if you're a marketer sitting there kind of going yeah, we should be doing it. How do you go about identifying what a good influencer or someone who could be a good person to reach out to? What are the hallmarks of someone who you want to engage with? 

Sharyn Smith 

Yeah, I think there's a number of sort of things to consider. Again, I'd say biggest is not always best. And the reason for that is the biggest influences are in high demand and with that comes quite high talent fees to engage and you're only getting then a couple of pieces of content. So you're at a high risk strategy there if you're putting all of your eggs in just a few baskets. And what we find is that if you can engage in what we call the long tail of influence, where we're looking at more smaller influences, micro influences that have highly engaged audiences, but they're able to tell a very customised story to their audience that is more influential. And when we had sort of campaigns that we've run, so for example, we ran a campaign with a particular Dyson brand where they were able to sell the product through their platform and we were able to track sales through that and I can tell you the smallest influencers sold a lot more Dysons. So even they don't have the same reach, but they've got higher engagement and they have higher influence. So that's probably the first thing I'd say. It's actually thinking long tail. I mean, that's where SEO…

James Lawrence 

That's where my head went when you said long tail. Shows me off. 

Sharyn Smith 

It's the same, right? So the power is in the tail. So if you can find a lot of influencers that have those sort of micro audiences, then they can be really powerful for your brand. It's then how you manage them effectively, because it does take a lot of time. Which is why as an agency, we manage a lot of micro influencer campaigns. We've got all the technology platforms that allows us to do that efficiently. But in terms of what would I look for in an influencer, obviously, are they influencing your target audience? So you need to be able to look into the analytics of their audiences. And this is where you can't really rely necessarily on them telling you that for obvious reasons. 

Sharyn Smith

You need to use first party data tools, and there's heaps of them out there that do it for you. We use one called Creator IQ, which is one of the biggest platforms that kind of allows you to do that, and then you can manage those campaigns at scale. That's not always accessible to the small to medium sized enterprise. There are some smaller ones out there. I think there's Strawberry Socials. There's Hype Auditor. I think something like Hype Auditor, where you can put a profile in there and look at the analytics of their audiences, but they're kind of more second party data, so they're kind using data that they've sort of scraped off the internet for that. So anything that you can use, I think Kitley is another one which actually allows you to get a media kit of an influencer so pulling all the data directly from the platform so you know it's correct. 

James Lawrence 

Without giving away any IP, would these tools also used to identify what might be a good influencer for your business? Or is it more just to verify once you've found someone that you think might be good? 

Sharyn Smith 

No. So you can use them as search for influencers. So you can put in keywords, you can put in categories, some of them even allow you to look at content, sort of styles and aesthetics. So yeah, there's a lot of detail that you can put into different tools to help you sort of get a short list. And I'd say the other thing is it's sometimes it's good to just ask your customers who's influential to them because if someone's influential to the customers you've got, they're probably going to be influential to your future customers. So that's kind of the low technology version.

Sharyn Smith

On the desktop of instagram underneath an influencer, they'll always have a list of influencers like them. So there's some really cost effective ways that you can use, around the tools, that help you without having to invest in particular search and discovery tools. I think there is a lot that you can actually do without them to find the influencers. Once you find one, you can find ones like them.

James Lawrence 

Yeah, that's awesome. And that's great for listeners to the pod who might not necessarily have the budget, whether to engage an agency like yours or to pay the tech fees themselves. If you could just talk about TikTok and what you're seeing. Like, it's such a fast moving environment. So I think it'd be fascinating to get, I guess, your outlook on kind of what's happening there and where you see it kind of going this year. 

Sharyn Smith 

Yeah, it's not slowing down. It is powering the influencer growth at the moment, TikTok is a juggernaut. It's one of those platforms that we haven't seen anything like it. When I had an interview the other day and someone's like, what's it like? And I was like, we haven't seen anything like the growth, the engagement, the kind of ecosystem of influences on every possible content niche. I saw a new one today. There's a new trend, grantok. So this is like a whole heap of grandmothers on TikTok. Very engaging, wholesome content. But everyone's there and everyone's influencing. Right. And then there's this kind of area which is they call it's even got its own hashtag, which is called TikTok Made Me Buy. Right. So people buying something and then creating content about it with the hashtag TikTok Made Me Buy. So it's incredibly influential. And again, this is kind of where I think influencers moved into more content creators. And it became more entertainment based, education based, rather than, I think, where Instagram influence began. It was very product placement. It wasn't necessarily entertaining or engaging. It was probably just beautiful styled content. The day of the flatlay. So much more engaging, much more educational content and in fact, much more influential.

Sharyn Smith

An interesting anecdote where we actually had an event last week and we had a whole heap of TikTok creators there. They kind of talked about how their audiences engage in their content. And this is I think it's a fashion TikToker. And she was talking about how she was just showcasing her morning, what she does in the morning, or just getting up and getting dressed and she was making some toast and she started getting DMs from people going, hey, what sort of peanut butter do you use? So this incredible influence. And she actually talked about it. She goes, Gen z want to be sold to. And so it was really interesting because they're not engaging in advertising, but they kind of want to know what these content creators are doing because they want to be influenced and because they're like, okay, that looks like a really great peanut butter, so you can influence me on that. They weren't there to be influenced on peanut butter. They were there to be influenced by fashion. But their lives are influencing people. 

James Lawrence 

That's fascinating because I guess from a paid ad perspective is the content itself has to be fit for platform and it has to have that much more authentic and native kind of feel. When you've said it a few times now, like Instagram probably felt a bit more beauty. It's more visual, it feels more like an ad. But the feeling on TikTok is that you really struggle if you try to come in with a style or tone that is just not native of to the platform. Is that what you'd agree? 

Sharyn Smith 

Yeah,I think it's very obvious when it wasn't created by the platform. And this is where I think creators are the key because it's very difficult for brands to create their own content, stay up to date, stay relevant to the culture. And we often talk about influencers are your connection to culture. And because they're in it, they're immersed in it with a particular culture or a particular niche or a particular category, they are the ones that are much more likely to know what is relevant to their audience, relevant to people who are interested in that particular category on that platform. Right. So you're much better to engage with creators, to participate with them to create that story, create that authentic story around your book. 

James Lawrence 

They understand that. They understand their audience and they understand the platform and the tone. Because I think that the point you made about Gen Zed wanting to be sold to. And we did a pod last year on Gen Z with Katy Richardson from UNiDAYS. And that generation is so savvy and their BS filter is so high and they either engage or just they smell something that isn't authentic straight away. 

Sharyn Smith 

I think you're right. They want to be sold to, but they want to be sold to in their way. Yeah. So that's the difference, isn't it? Which is not like previous generations. 

James Lawrence 

It's fascinating. What about just quickly the don'ts like, what are those things that you just have to be wary of or just don't do? Obviously the paid piece, I think that's an obvious one. If you're paying or if you're giving away product, disclose it. Any other bits? 

Sharyn Smith 

Yeah, on that disclosure piece, I think, don't engage with creators without the proper governance in place. And what I mean by that is have a contract. Even if you're just gifting product, you should have some really short contract which basically just is an agreement between you and the creator that they will use the correct disclosure hashtags and you specify what they are. And if there obviously is a payment, then there's a lot of things that go into a contract in terms of the exclusivity periods. Obviously the disclosures that you're expecting, the amounts of content that you're expecting, how long that content needs to stay live, by what frequency. So having a correct contractual agreement in place is really important. So don't engage without one. 

Sharyn Smith

Don't try and control things too much. And I think this is where it's that kind of blending between kind of having a really good brief and having, again those governance structures in place with creators. But don't tell them exactly what to do because then you're not getting the creativity - creators are going to create. So you've got to sort of also trust that you've selected good creators and give it over to them. And in regulated industries, we would always have approval of content before it's posted, but not all industries we don't do that in because then you're missing that kind of dynamic, sort of always on approach to the content. 

Sharyn Smith

Don't sort of just leave them to their own devices as well. They want brands to engage with them. So if you have your own platform, then they want you to post on their content to visibly engage with them and thank them. So don't just kind of give them the product and brief them and treat them sort of as a transaction. End of the day, they're people, they respond to relationships. They'll probably post more if you're engaging and participating with them. If you're going to engage in this space, it's as a brand become part of that participation as well. 

James Lawrence 

Yeah, and imagine that just has to lead to better outcomes, right? Picking influencers genuinely like your product or service and if that's the case, then it should be a natural kind of relationship right back and forth.

Sharyn Smith 

That's a good piece as well. How do you find your influences is also if influences are engaging with your brand, then that's the best way to find out.

James Lawrence 

Awesome insights. I was focusing on the negative there, but we got to leave this on a positive tone. I asked this of everyone that comes onto the pod, what's the best piece of career advice that you'd give to a marketer in Australia? 

Sharyn Smith 

Best piece of career advice? We are looking for marketers that are full stack now and I think obviously what we're talking about today, the influence kind of space is part of that stack. And. Really being curious and reading a lot and staying in touch with technology, with social media, with social influence. So I think being curious and staying up to date and thinking very full stack in terms of being able to understand every possible facet of marketing, I think is really important.

James Lawrence 

Yeah, I love that. I think when we're hiring, it's definitely a trait we look for is curiosity because our industry, your industry, the landscape changes so quickly and we need to evolve and we have to kind of want to learn and grow and all those things. 

Sharyn Smith 

I think a good marketer is curious about people.

James Lawrence 

That's right. Awesome. And sorry I lied. I said one more question and I had two. Last question is, where can we find you?

Sharyn Smith 

You can find me at Social Soup. So my agency Social Soup or the Influence Group, or if it is a specific question about the industry itself and you have any questions around regulation. So AIMCo for the Australian Influencer Marketing Council. There's a website and you can email in and we can get back to you on those questions. 

James Lawrence 

Sharon Smith thanks so much for coming onto the Smarter Marketer podcast. 

Sharyn Smith 

Awesome.