Partnering with influencers is one of the single best ways to grow your company today.

The reason is it's cheaper than a lot of other advertising channels, and it's much higher trust and credibility.

In today's show, I'm going to do a live demo of how you actually do your first influencer partnership, and I'm giving you my special scorecard that's going to break down how to actually rank all the influencers in your market from most I should work with to least likely I should work with so that you don't waste your time.

Your business might not be growing the way you want.

And that's probably because you're taking the easy way out.

You're just putting a credit card into Google or Meta and the costs keep climbing and the math keeps breaking.

I'm here to tell you about the clever, better alternative.

The companies that are growing the best right now have deep, deep partnerships with influencers because those influencers are lower cost and have...

bigger brand and product demand upside.

And today I'm going to break down the playbook.

That's super simple.

Anyone can do it to actually working with influencers.

And you don't have to believe just me.

One of the biggest companies in the world, Unilever, has scaled their influencer marketing through the roof.

In the last two years, they went from working with thousands of influencers to working with over 300 ,000 influencers and creators.

It's now a critical part of their strategy.

There's not a company that's more analytical, that's more focused on growing.

You use their products every day.

Axe, Dove, Hellman's Mayonnaise, all of those things.

And they're working with influencers to make that growth go round.

The world is full of distractions today.

Think about it this way.

Your ideal customer, she's out there.

She's ignoring you completely.

She's not picking up your calls.

Your emails are going to the spam filter.

What she is doing now.

She's probably working out most mornings.

And in that period of time, she puts her headphones in and either listens to or watches content from somebody she deeply trusts.

You know, for me, this is David Sinra and the Founders Podcast.

I bring him and the founders he talks to.

with me everywhere i go and so the companies like ramp and vanta who sponsor the founders podcast are deeply in my head and i'm really aware of them and i'm considering them if i'm making a choice the companies that aren't they're kind of being ignored by me and the same thing goes for your customer that's out there and so The way you want to think about this is you want to get into that trusted

slot in your customer's day, and you're not going to get there through brute force of emailing or calling or putting your credit card in to buy some ads.

You're going to have to get there in partnership with the best influencers in your market.

Now, you might be asking, okay, this seems hard.

I like this Google and...

Facebook and other channels where like I just pick some target audiences, type in a few ads and put my credit card in and wash my hands with it and walk away.

Well, this is a different world, but I want to show you the most basic straightforward way to actually get started so that you can get your first partnership off the ground today.

So I actually want to show you in practice what you would do the most basic version to really be successful working with influencers.

I'm going to pick.

a fictional industry.

Let's say I'm running a company and I target IT professionals at mid -sized companies.

I don't go and just look at topics that are really relevant to IT professionals.

So this would be like security.

This would be productivity.

I like productivity.

Let's go with productivity as the angle.

So now I want to go and look at productivity influencers.

One of the counterintuitive things about influencer marketing is you would think you would go to one of the AI agents or assistants like Claude or ChatGPT and have them do all this for you.

They're okay, not great at it.

That's your first tip.

To really get the most up -to -date data and details and who's really killing it, you kind of need to go to the platform yourself.

Hey, if you like today's show, we got all the resources for you to give this a try yourself.

You can click the link, scan the QR code, and check those out.

They're all free.

So you can pick any platform, TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube.

I like YouTube a lot, and I think YouTube is really good, especially if you're trying to drive.

customer acquisition, not just brand awareness with your influencer marketing.

So I would go in here and I would just in YouTube, I would search like business productivity.

And I just want to actually understand who's creating here.

And so it's like, oh, you've got the productivity Institute.

I'm literally just scrolling through Dan Martell.

Oh, this is interesting.

Here's Dan.

Oh, okay.

So he's actually an influencer.

He's got books.

He's got software as a science, buy back your time.

Oh, maybe he's a little bit more individual productivity focused than business productivity focused.

But he's interesting.

I would probably literally just put him on my list.

But for the sake of this, I want to see if I can find a better example.

Because Dan has almost 3 million subscribers.

He's got a big audience.

He'd be probably a tough and expensive first pitch for my influencer program.

So I'm going to just keep going here and I'm seeing who else.

Okay.

Ross Harkness.

He is a business influencer.

He's got 70 ,000 subscribers, but he's got some pretty big views, you know, 157 ,000 views on one video.

So this is what's interesting to me is here's somebody who clearly is building for business owners, systems and strategies.

Okay, if I'm an IT person, I might be thinking about starting my own company.

I certainly care about systems.

It's my whole job.

And I want to be seen as a strategic thinker.

So like Ross is probably my guy.

And so you're like, okay, I've just found my first potential person to partner with.

Normally, you can just go straight to the YouTube bio.

And he's got a work with me link.

He also has a newsletter.

And so what I could do is I can just go straight to Ross's site, right?

And he's got a whole breakdown of who the heck he is.

He's trying to pitch you his class and everything else, which is fine.

What I'm actually trying to do is get his contact information.

Okay.

So I've identified that I want to work with Ross.

Now I got to do the next step.

It's like, how do I partner with him?

So I'm going to put his website in here and I'm going to say, I want to partner with Ross on an influencer marketing program.

I want you to find his email address, give me a likely range of cost and draft an email for me to Ross exploring the idea of partnering together.

Cool.

Okay.

So.

Tools like Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, your AI tool du jour are really good for this stage.

Now I've identified somebody.

Now I actually need to go through and figure out, can I get in touch with them?

And what is it going to cost me?

And how I should think about the math relative to the cost of partnering with them.

Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this?

You've been prompted for 20 minutes.

The output is polished, confident, and completely useless.

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Like I said, the AI tools are really good for this stage of the influencer process.

I tend to really like perplexity for this.

Found Ross's email.

He's based at Belfast.

He's the founder of this company.

We figured that out.

It talks about his audience.

So 700K aggregate across Instagram, threads, LinkedIn, plus YouTube.

His audience is business owners in the six to eight figure range consuming systems, productivity, delegation contact.

So because it's my perplexity, it's doing this for HubSpot.

The way to think about this is here is what it's estimating your costs for working with Ross is going to be.

So like an IG post is probably three to $8 ,000.

What you'd want to do is a multiple program of like a YouTube video and everything else.

So your opening offer, it's saying, is probably like 15 to 25K to get started.

So you have some important questions to answer.

One, what do I have to offer Ross's?

audience relative to my business.

Second is what are my leads worth to me?

Let's say you're paying a hundred dollars for a lead right now.

If you're going to give Ross 15 K, do you need to generate at least 150 leads from that program?

And so you have to basically do the conversion rate math.

And you, what you are going to want to do is ask.

your influencers, somebody like Ross for past campaign performance, to get benchmarks of how many people watched, how many people clicked, how many people completed the authors.

The other thing you're going to want to do, that's a little counterintuitive.

So you're going to want to trust the influencer.

The influencer has a deep connection with their audience and you want them to help make sure that you have the right offer for their audience and help match the creative and offer so that it really resonates when they're promoting it to their audience.

Once you've actually figured that out, then you can know, one, the questions to ask Ross in this case.

Second, If this estimated cost range is within your budget or not before you actually finalize an agreement.

But the only way to really know is to draft up an email to Ross and shoot that over to him.

And you can put all your context here and have your AI tool of choice draft up that email, shoot that over.

And then you're probably going to have to get on a quick call, ask for some of that benchmark data.

And if the numbers work, you're off to the races on your first partnership.

All right.

So I showed you how to actually establish your first influencer partnership, but I don't think that's enough.

I wanted to give you a scorecard for how to think about evaluating.

any potential influencer you might be partnering with.

This is my creator slash influencer scorecard.

We talk about this and we outline it in detail in our new book, Loop, Outlearn, Outmarket, Outgrow, which is coming out September 22nd.

Check it out.

You can click the link down in the description below.

But this scorecard is from Loop.

What you want to do is you want to grade your creators on these criteria.

But if you're thinking about creators, you're thinking about their audience through three lenses, size, fit, and growth.

Size is, do they have a really big audience, a medium audience, a smaller audience?

One of the things I found is that medium audience creators are often the most effective.

The next is fit.

Are they related to your audience or is it a bullseye?

dead overlap with your audience and their overlap.

Then the next thing is growth.

Is their audience kind of staying flat?

Are they adding a lot of new viewers and subscribers every month?

The more their audience is growing, the more longer term partnership possibility you have with them.

So those are the three key factors that you're going to want to score.

And if somebody scores high on all of those, they're probably a no brainer to work with.

Few actually are though.

The way I think about it is you want a really high fifth score, and really high growth score and a mid at least a middle of the road audience score if you're going to go to all the trouble of building a great relationship with this creator and influencer you want to be able to work with them over months you don't want to do a one and done one -off campaign with them and so you need that audience

growth and you need the quality of audience to be right so anytime you're doing research this is the scorecard and how you should think about which creators make the cut for your outreach and your email And this isn't me just sitting here saying, hey, this is a smart thing to do.

We've done this at HubSpot.

We've grown our creator program from tens of thousands of dollars and a handful of creators to millions of dollars and a whole roster of creators and influencers.

And we're doing so because the math works and it's really effective for our company.

And I think it's effective for far more companies than are doing it right now.

And there's not much loss in experimenting.

doing a couple experimental campaigns.

I just gave you the blueprint on how to do that.

And I want you to drop a comment.

Let me know if this video unlocked you wanting to do your first influencer campaign.

All right, that is a crash course in influencer marketing.

Please hit like, hit subscribe, check out the loop book, and we'll see you next time on Marketing Against the Grain.

Let me tell you about another great podcast.

This Old Marketing, hosted by Joe Polizzi and Robert Rose.

Joe Polizzi and Robert Rose, two of the most well -known experts in the content marketing space, talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers.

Each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines, rants from Joe and Robert on what's going on in the industry, and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from.

Always useful, entertaining, and never more than 60 minutes.

They recently did an episode called Doing the Job is No Longer Enough about the changing relationship between companies, creators, and employees.

Listen to This Old Marketing wherever you get your podcasts.

Here's a task from three days ago I totally missed.

HubSpot.

Grow better.