Run ads from a creator's handle, not yours. It converts 15% better.
Here's something most merchants don't realize: you can run paid ads through an influencer's handle instead of your own. It's called whitelisting, and it converts about 15% better. Brad Hoos, CEO of Outloud Group and owner of Shopify store MuskOx Flannels, has been doing influencer marketing since YouTube was mostly cat videos. In this episode, he breaks down how whitelisting works step by step, why he thinks of creators as "decentralized media companies," and what most brands overthink when they're just getting started.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster • 00:00.001
This episode is brought to you in part by Swim. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swim actually activates that data. When someone wish lists a product, you could trigger price drop or back-in-stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Clavio or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wish lists for gifts and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in store. And unlike card abandonment, wishlist data is permission-based. These are people raising their hands saying, hey, I want this. Just not right now. Swim's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes. You can try it for free today at getswim. com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M. com slash Kurt Today on the unofficial Shopify Podcast, we're gonna talk influencer marketing with someone who is providing that service for themselves in their own store, Muskox Flannels, and as part of an agency that has been doing it. For what appears to be almost 20 years, which I'm doing the math on that, I'm like, man, how long has this been around? But we'll get into the story. Uh I really uh an incredible guest, fun guest, Brad Hoos. Who's gonna join us from Outloud Group, Outloud Talent, and Muscox Flannel? Brad, thanks for joining us. How you doing?
Brad Hoos • 01:42.820
Kurt, I'm doing great. It is an honor and a pleasure to be here. I have listened to your podcast for many years. My team has uh received many uh emails, texts, slacks with links to the episodes over the years. So I'm I'm grateful to be on here and give back to a small amount to this this fantastic community here.
Kurt Elster • 02:03.340
I am well, you know, you made my day. I'm thrilled to hear it. Uh it's always fun when you get like a listener who is is successful and then becomes a guest. You know, it's just great to hear those stories and discover like, oh, here's someone else's success I, you know, totally unintentionally became a part of. A little bit.
Brad Hoos • 02:20.740
If you're like me, you probably get a lot from this podcast. So let me let me say this from a guest perspective, which maybe is a little unorthodox, but Hopefully if you're listening and you've gotten a lot out of this podcast over the months and years that you've listened to it, or hopefully at the end of episode today, leave a review because I know it helps Kurt. And he's great and selfless and won't won't won't ask uh uh it very often. So hopefully we can all help Kurt here as well, because I know how much I have been helped by by Kurt and this great podcast over the years.
Kurt Elster • 02:48.960
Oh, God, thank you. It is such a relief. I hate promoting myself. Truly I do. For someone else to ask for the reviews on my behalf, you have done done uh done me a great favor here. But okay, you know, enough about how fabulous I am and how large my head will be. I wanna know about this How you've been doing influencer marketing for 18 years. You know, you've got you have a Shopify store, Muscox Flannel, but that's a recent thing, right
Brad Hoos • 03:15.440
It is fairly recent. Yeah, that's that's been around for about five or six years. We we launched that um right around COVID, right before co COVID. But in terms of influencer marketing at the Out Loud group, uh yeah, my my business partner, Joel, started Out Loud nearly 20 years ago and and I've been involved with him since 2014. So I don't always like to do the math on that, but we we are definitely OGs in the influencer world and I've seen a lot of trends come and go and uh have uh done a lot of interesting things over the years, made a lot of mistakes, and I think we've had a few successes along the way too.
Kurt Elster • 03:54.820
So saying you this started 18 years ago and you joined in 2014, all right, now the math you know, the the math on the that timeline starts to make a little more sense. 2014, that's when Instagram is really taking off. But you know and YouTube's already been around, you know, for many years at this point. But you know, take me back there. I want to hear it. You know, joining it, how it got started, etc.
Brad Hoos • 04:18.520
Yeah, so my my business partner, Joel Beckett, amazing guy. He he was working as a high school teacher in southwest Detroit. And on the side, he had a history podcast because he was really into history. And over time, uh, podcast picks up. some traction, he gets interest from advertisers, they start to negotiate, things start going well. And this is right around the time of 2008 when, you know, Lehman and the collapses and the banking crisis. And you know, the bottom kind of drops out of the economy and what people are willing to spend on marketing because you have so much uncertainty. And Brand comes back to him and says, hey, we can, I'm sorry, we can only pay you 10% of what we had agreed to because of all the pressure that we're having, all the reasons that I just mentioned. Um, but we do have a little bit more budget, so if you have other podcasts, we'd be interested in those. And so Joel, being the enterprising, smart chap that he was, went out and found a couple of other podcasts. um for this and took a commission as as part of that. And I was like, oh this is this is kind of interesting. And so got really, you know, podcast is huge. We can get get into that. We still do, you know, a lot of podcasts, podcasts massively. influential and but I at that time you know started to do a little bit more and more around podcast and helping some agencies find podcasts because it was very very fragmented at the at the time And then YouTube sprung up and became a thing and started to mature marginally past, you know, cat videos uh and a few like viral uh moments. And Joel of it, it would be really easy to find the email addresses of the creators. And so well, because in in YouTube, um, you know, if you go to uh go to uh like a creator's page and if you click on about or a boot depending on we're which side of uh the border you're on uh you you can you can get a chance to see uh yeah you know the contact information of the of the creator and so it was really easy to send send an email and and now those emails of creators at scale tend to get very much flooded or uh you know or managed by a you know manager or or agent. But back then, you know, d doing, you know, brand Brendels was quite unique and was really able to drive efficiency of getting in touch with with uh creators. In this case, YouTube is supposed to podcast. And so Joel carved out his own niche in that, which is really fascinating, and he started to get more and more traction, largely was working for other agencies where he was kind of like white labeled do doing doing different things and he started uh work with some brands directly including like Crunchyroll uh as as well And uh did a ton of work with with Audible. And so I got connected to Joel through a mutual friend and was immediately very intrigued, right? I'd Knew nothing about influencer marketing. I had a couple degrees in engineering, worked as a management consultant, and then was working with a with a VC. uh venture capital um you know uh venture capital fund and thought this was like just super interesting and joel and i immediately clicked and I started to you know consult with him a little bit and you know fast forward seven months and you know I was uh I was partnering with with Joel on trying to build up this this influencer agency and then boop fast forward a whole bunch of years. Uh we're we're a team of about sixty-five folks. We're oh wow you know global now certainly work across you know, four major platforms, YouTube, TikTok, Podcast, and and Instagram, um as as well. But yeah, the the beginning it really came from just Putting yourself out there, adapting when opportunities pr presented and continued to pull the pull the string and evolve with the with the industry and influencer marketing has certain certainly evolved a lot in the last 10 to 15 years.
Kurt Elster • 08:25.420
So, I mean if that's so successful, why go through the the hassle of uh starting your own Shopify store with Muskox flannels?
Brad Hoos • 08:33.220
That's a good question. Um, well, uh one, I think we're we're sicko's. We're we're gluttons for for punishment. So anyone who's started their own company trying to sell anything knows it's it's hard, right?
Kurt Elster • 08:44.339
It's it's not an easy endeavor, but they call it a hustle, but yeah, it's more like a grind at times.
Brad Hoos • 08:50.360
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah, we we like to remind ourselves that that's how like diamonds are uh you know formed from extreme pre pressure as as well. But yeah, why why do we start Muskox? We we started Muskox because we saw a lot of brands um that were ultimately making money from creators. Not that they were taking advantage of them in any way, but through the partnerships that the creator helped to build the brand and to sell the product. And now the brand is is making money from that. We said, well, what if what this was earlier early days where things weren't as as common doing this? We said, well, what if what if the creators really developed the brand and We had a a deal with a large outdoor influencer, Matt Carricker, Demolition Ranch, many millions of followers, and we had we had a deal, you know, kind of fall through to be a sponsor for a camo brand. And deals don't fall apart overnight, but you know, as a as it went through the undulations of of a deal as as it may, we said, you know, if this falls through, maybe we should just start our own. Brand, I don't even know that we need to partner with this existing brand. Well, uh, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, that that deal did fall through And we said, hey, why don't we why don't we launch a a new brand? And so we we did. And the whole premise behind it was uh for uh for the out loud group was this is basically a a test case for be able to launch new brands and partnerships with the with creators. And and so We saw it as very connected to our business, although on the surface you say, what the heck is an influencer agency doing launching its own flannel brand? Uh that's a valid question, but we we still to this day see those as you know very interconnected.
Kurt Elster • 10:32.700
And this is not like I'm looking at the site. It is not just slapped together. This is a really nice, nice looking site. And it has a message to it, and like it's a lot of custom illustrations. You know, I need another flannel, like, you know, I need an extra hole in my head. But I you could convince me.
Brad Hoos • 10:50.900
Well, thank you. We won't turn this into a sales pitch, but You know, we we have won best overall flannel bike gear junkie for the last four years. And sadly I have to say that I have to say that we did not pay for that uh since it's 2026 and you can pay to get the best of for a lot. That's that's completely you know, or organic recog recognition. But yeah, thanks. It it it's taken a lot of twists and turns and um yeah, uh happy to share the story, but probably not super relevant here. Yeah, the creator that we originally partnered with Between the time we said yes and the time that we actually had flannels, he had a challenge with a knife brand that he had launched and just didn't feel good going public with anything new 'cause he w didn't want his audience to ever feel like they were taking advantage of them. We had managed Matt for years since day managed Matt, even though he's r retired. So relationship's great. He advocated for the brand but didn't feel like he could be you know externally the owner of the of of the brand, even not the owner behind the scenes now, uh either. So it it's taken a lot of twists and turns as any business do does, but it's been a fantastic sandbox for us to experiment with and continue to push the envelope for our brand partners. Where if there's something new and different and we're not certain about it, we'll try it with muskox. And that's helped muskox a lot, and I think has helped our brand partners uh pretty pretty significantly as well
Kurt Elster • 12:14.120
It's nice to have that that sandbox to play with. It's also nice to have uh you know that that social proof, right? If I'm I have a brand, I have a Shopify store and I'm hiring, you know, a service partner, a marketer. You, you know, the the case study's helpful, you know, all that proof is helpful, but then you putting yourself in my shoes in this very real way, ah, you know, that I think adds a lot of credibility. The Yeah, I've gotten that a lot. People are like, oh do you have your own store? Like, no man, that sounds really hard. I know too much. That's true. That's true. I mean Oh, I don't have time for that. Are you kidding me? It's not easy. I'm just aware of the work that goes into it because off you know, I'm I'm part of that work. Um but okay, I want to talk about how to think about influencers and content creators. You know, many years years ago now at this point Like six years ago, someone said to me, Hey, I think, you know, in the in the near future, every brand is gonna have to think about themselves as their own little TV station, you know, their own little TV studio that has to produce content. And I suspect, you know, that's probably your approach as well. But the influencers are the ones that you go to to get that content. But but talk me through it. Like if I'm I'm that brand, how are we thinking about Yeah, these folks and these relationships.
Brad Hoos • 13:33.319
Yeah, I I like to think of creators as decentralized media companies. When you're a brand and you think about that, I think you rec y it's a little easier to recognize their their power and their their influence. And so if if you were to zoom back, you know, geez now th forty plus years, you know, there was ABC, NBC, CBS, and maybe Fox as like the primarily me primary video-based media outlets. And that that evolved to being cable and having a 42 channels in ESPN and USA. Right. And and now it's evolved to having Instagram, TikTok, you know, y you YouTube. It's kind of sort of podcast on on video now as well. And you have thousands and thousands of creators who are at scale, right? Hundreds of thousands if you're not talking about scale. And at the end of the day, it's it's really helped for Everyone to be able to find their community. But at the end of the day, like these creators are still massive media outlets, right, for brands to be able to connect with. And I think It's really important for brands to just recognize the power that creators have and you know how in a world where we all hate, you know, being sold to and we hate ad blockers, we actually want to hear the opinions of of influencers and influencers are so great at you know being able to really understand a value proposition, beta test things, which I don't think brands do enough is like early in the process if you're launching a new product. Bring creators in, even if your creators aren't developing the product, which is great if you do that, but have them be the first ones to test it. Because as we know, it's one thing to understand something and it's another to understand it well enough to explain it to someone else And creators inherently have to explain it well enough to their audiences. You know, and I'm sure can personally relate to Kurt. And so I think, you know, brands need to understand the power of creators and Just pause for a moment when before they're partnering or figure out what they're doing and think about how they can use creators holistically because I mean the the trends and the impact that influencers have on Preferences and buying decisions is is j just massive. And I feel like a lot of times folks are still stuck in the a singular viewpoint of how creators can can or should impact those those decisions around um perception or purchases.
Kurt Elster • 16:07.020
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Brad Hoos • 17:18.319
To start, I think that's that's getting it right, right? It like just do something with creators. Okay. So I think my record my my advice if you're a merchant and you've never done anything with a create with influencers or creators is to do something, right? Like if your car is stuck in the snow in the middle of January, go like and you want to go northeast. Don't worry about the direction you're going. Your car's stuck in the snow. Just start rocking it and get some movement. Once you get on the road, then you can worry about going northeast. So start to work with creators, ask questions, see what they like, see what it does to your audience. There's sort of like no bad first step you could take would be my my maybe you know um contrarian take there. But then in terms of what they what they get wrong I I feel like a lot of times brands can try to see creators as uh a uh extension of their brand voice as opposed to as opposed to brand advocates. So it's really simple. Let the creators say what they want to about your product. Don't try to tell them like, hey, talk about exactly how soft the flannel is and this locker loop's great and we won these awards, right? Like just say share your honest opinion about the the flannel go because then they're advocating for your product, which is what they're good at, as opposed to trying to be an extension of like your your brand voice. So I think that's one thing that we see you know, merchants that are, you know, starting out get wrong and we see massive merchants, you know, who have invested a lot of money to get like, you know, the the brand proposition and the brand voice and the brand pentameter. Cor correct. So I think that's the the number one thing that um we see merchants doing wrong is trying to force a script or really uh prescriptive talking points on creators.
Kurt Elster • 19:16.299
Yeah. Well and I get you know the the fear there is like I've got this brand and I have to protect it. you know, before we we put it out there. But in doing so, trying to protect it, we have kind of the opposite effect. I think especially, you know, when you're going to an influencer, they will have a tendency to be most protective of their audio audience. They have that a parasocial relationship with them, but they want to protect them because that is also you know their value. It goes both ways. And so to have a brand say, you're going to talk about this in this way, well, that's probably quite antithetical to how most of these people approach producing content. Having the best intention on the merchant side, this could still backfire on you. Or much easier to go, all right, you know, just get out there, be honest, you know, and just have have that brand awareness be the goal, I suppose.
Brad Hoos • 20:03.500
Yeah, and I think uh in you bring you bring up a really important point, right? So we talk about like what is the goal, right? If brand awareness is the goal, great. But I think in influencer, particularly when you start to you know invest real dollars and real dollars is you know a fluid thing right like a hundred thousand dollars when you're starting out as a massive amount. And once if you're working for Fortune 5, you know, 500, you know, mer merchant or something, like It's probably not a huge investment. But point is anytime you're starting to deal with dollars of meaning, you really gotta be dialed into what's your objective for the campaign. And and be honest with with yourself up front, right? Is it awareness? Do people just need to understand about that your product and get educated on it? Are you trying to drive drive conversion? Because the blessing and the curse of influencer marketing is that it is a full funnel program. You can optimize it for conversion. You can optimize it for uh for for awareness and everything in between, you know? Um and a lot of times folks like to think that they're gonna look at something more upper or mid-funnel, but then the second the results are in, they're only looking at how it did from a from a uh conversion per perspective, right? We see that so much. Because it's like we want to talk about upper funnel, but when push comes to shelf, we're only looking at conversion. So I it it the the tactics that we would take will be very different depending on what the objectives are, right? And so I think taking some time to really think about why you're doing influencer. I mean, we're all so busy, you know, influencer should be part of your marketing stack. Like just go, right? Well, you need to you need to pause and really dial in those objectives because we would, you know, as an agency, we would recommend very different approaches depending on what the um what the objective is.
Kurt Elster • 21:56.960
So what what's the right objective? Yeah. How do I think through that?
Brad Hoos • 22:00.840
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So let me tell you, I'll start with what's not the right objective. The right objective is not our board said we should be on TikTok. So let me call let me call uh Brad and his team to say what what can we we do on TikToks. We see that a lot. Like that's that's not a that's not an objective. That's a that's a tactic. I think for look for most brands, if you're starting out and you're in that high growth phase You need to be laser focused on sales and can and conversion. And as you continue to grow, you will start to see yourself plateauing from a search perspective and from a paid social perspective and that's the moment where you need to stop selling product and start building a brand. And from that moment forward, you're going to have a mix of branding being the right objective and conversion being the right objective. And generally to start, influencer are great because it can be a hybrid. And so if you are listening to to this and you're a merchant that's just starting out or still very much in like the figuring out product market fit or you think you have it and you're still trying to scale it and it's going pretty well. Uh you should be focused on conversion, right? Like you you need people to buy your product. And then once you're trying to evolve or maybe you're getting into retail now as well where there's still certain things you can do for attribution we can talk about, but it gets it gets much more challenging. Then I think that's the point where you should be looking at you know a hybrid approach. And once you get to be you know, a large organization, and you should have you know dedicated campaigns towards just building out and and growing the the brand in addition to still having you know conversion uh uh uh campaigns and programs as well.
Kurt Elster • 23:50.059
So how all right, if if typically conversion is the goal, what are how do we measure it? How do we get attribution on that? Because it it gets a little squishy.
Brad Hoos • 23:59.260
It it can, um, but it's t 2026 and and you know folks it folks should be able to you know d dial that in a bit more. So I guess Because the attribution is a little bit different platform by platform and uh don't want to bore folks by going into too much detail with each. So let me just start with like if we're talking about conversion, most cases we are going to be talking about running paid campaigns with influencers on meta or tick tock. And then also increasingly we can do a lot on podcast. And We'll take a quick tangent on podcast and then we can go back to meta and TikTok. But podcast has the amazing blessing of the ability to use a pixel. For all intents and purposes, you can't use a pixel on YouTube. meta or TikTok because they're walled gardens. But on a podcast, you know, when when you uh we we record this episode and then it gets pushed out So there's something called an RSS feed, that's how the podcast actually gets out to Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever provider.
Kurt Elster • 25:06.960
It's unique in that it gets syndicated across platforms.
Brad Hoos • 25:10.380
Exactly. And as part of that, you can include a pixel in that. So when people are listening to a podcast, um what they may not realize is there is a pixel that's dropped. And if you're If I download the podcast on my phone, and let's say Kurt, we we live in the same place, the Pixel is smart enough to know that like, hey, all these devices are, you know, sleeping at at night in the same in the same residence. So if you then make a purchase you know, a day a week after on on your laptop the day a week after I downloaded on my phone. Again, if we were living in the same residence, um, the Pixel would be able to attribute that conversion to the fact that um I downloaded the podcast, right? So it so it can fa factor that in. And so that that the the pixel is what makes a lot of brands really gravitate towards podcasting as the next um you know attributable platform as they're sort of, I don't want to say gr graduating, but they're as they're continuing to level up paid social and you know paid paid search. And so that's that's where podcasts can be extremely powerful.
Kurt Elster • 26:22.240
What about um do we ever use coupons for attribution?
Brad Hoos • 26:27.840
Yes. So um So where you where we see coupons being helpful is like we we can't put vanity URLs and and coupons in the same bucket, right? And so vanity URLs Definitely preferred to coupons because of the ability of the retail me nots and honeys of the world to be able to pick up those coupon codes. So there's some things that we can do to try to minimize But you know, the the best the the the best practice you know as we record this is to have you know a vanity URL that someone has to to enter into or enter with a you know the the b backslash uh you know unofficial Shopify or what whatever the case may may be. Um and then when you enter in through that, the discount code or the promo code is auto-applied, right? So there's not a a promo code that's out there. And so it's much uh it's it's much harder for folks to you know have like a leaked promo code when there's not actually a promo code. It's just going to a specific UR URL. So that's what we see, you know, work you know typ typically with a lot of brands. um that we're partnering with, particularly on, you know, YouTube or Instagram shorts where you could have it be like more organic. Content. Meaning the creator might be getting paid, but their audience is organic. I'm when I say organic, I'm just making a distinction between creators posting to their audience, quote unquote organic, versus like paid dollars going out to to send send the program out. Go ahead. Well I I was just gonna say go going back to sort of the original question, I know I tried to have the podcast be a tangent, but to to bring it back in probably too rambling of a way, so I apologize. But it when when we're talking about like uh measurement in what we're doing on like meta or TikTok. There, what we recommend is in in short, and we can talk about the details of this too. Short. uh partnering with creators, having it come where if you're a user of the platform, it's showing up as it's coming from the creator as opposed to the the brand. But on the back end, you have the accounts linked, you know, creator listing, allow listing. We really don't use the term whitelist anymore, but it all all means the same same thing. Um where we're able to attribute every single you know sale using like the power of like the Facebook slash you know meta uh algorithm and and similarly for for TikTok where that attribution on a per creator and per sale level is is quite strong. Imperfect, but but quite strong.
Kurt Elster • 29:14.019
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Brad Hoos • 30:25.360
You got it. You got it. So t taking a step back, that seems powerful. It is powerful. On average, and this doesn't mean this is what you're going to see for your brand, but on average in aggregate, we we see about a 15% increase still today in terms of conversion efficiency when we're running campaigns coming from the creator's handle versus coming from the brand's handle. So there's there's three kind of ads that you could you can do. So like performance, you know, paid paid social here. Number one, you can run you know, ads from your own fa Facebook account. You can boost uh posts that you've you've done or probably you know more more likely more you know more more savvy is you're going into your own business account and you're running paid ads coming from your your own company, right? So say Muskox Flannels, we run paid ads where is your scroll and it's coming from from the brand Muskox. The second thing is allow listing or creator listing or whitelisting, whatever term we want to use, it all means the same thing, where exactly like you said, it's coming from the creator's handle. And I'll talk about how to do that in just a second. But then the third thing that's pretty new and we're seeing really good results with is collaboration posts where uh or content where It is showing up from both the brand and the creator's uh account. And that seems to work really well. And that's true for like organic post or or paid. But I think where there's a huge opportunity for merchants is really working on like creator listing, right? And so Um if if we want to get granular, I can kind of walk through the how how how we how you actually can can do that. Please do. Okay, so the the first thing, and this may be obvious, but I want to start at the beginning is like you really need to have a business account for your brand. And for any creator that you're working with, the creator can't be developing account on a personal or individual account. They have to have a business. account as as well, right? So that that we'll just pick on Meta for this because meta's still the most most common, right? So you you gotta, you know, through the uh ha have an account that uh exists where you can operate through the meta business suite. And so what once that happens, you know, generally the the flow um would be the creator actually creates the piece of of content and um they can post it or not post it but now that piece of content is living in their their uh you know their account and then the creator needs to well f first generally What will happen is the brand will request access to a Facebook page. So you go into your business account, you request access. to a Facebook page, you find the creator, right? You enter in their their page URL and you you make a request. Now I'll put a quick caveat out there. Yes, uh if I want to be like you know glass half full, they get a notification, they get an email, it's really seamless. And and all that's true, but the reality is Creators get inundated with spam. They get inundated with requests. The notifications are probably at 253. They're not necessarily going to see it, so you definitely need to stay in close communication. with the with the creator to make sure they're taking a look and actually going in and approving um that that request from from the brand. And then Once you've done that and you've gotten that approval from a brand, uh excuse me, from the creator, you need you need to go in and make sure you have uh access to the correct assets. from the creator's account. And you have to be careful and granular because Instagram is considered an asset. Facebook is considered an an asset. The content is an asset. The audience. is is an asset. And then you need to figure out like what individual pieces of content you want to run and the creator will approve specific pieces of content. for for you. So once you get all that set up, which this is really just you know the longer version of how do you link the creator and the brand's account, then it becomes pretty straightforward. You're gonna go into your ads manager, you're gonna create a can Paying, figure out the audience. You want to use the creator's audience, which you now have access to. And generally speaking, like a look look alike. audience, you're going to choose your objective for for the campaign and you know go about you know g getting things uh ready for for um for actually executing a campaign just like you you would um And then most importantly at the very end, you select which page, meaning the brand's page or the creator's page, that you want to run the campaign through. And so you of course, I shouldn't say of course, but generally speaking, you're going to want to choose the creator's page to make sure when someone's scrolling, they see it coming from the creator. And so that's really how you set up a loud listing. And to your point earlier, Kurt, I mean, this is super powerful. And it's powerful because You're harnessing the credibility of the creator when someone sees that it's coming from the creator. And it's also so that's good for great from a brand perspective, but From a creator, especially smaller creators, now you're getting paid dollars. You're seeing a lot of people are seeing this content for the first time, and it's really easy for you to click to the creator's page. and to you know possibly follow follow them as well. So it can be a really a win for creators, especially up-and-coming creators is as well. And still we're seeing brands really underutilized.
Kurt Elster • 36:01.440
This this tech technique and I suppose I'm also not looking for it, but I just don't see this one a lot. It sounds awesome. You know, and my pushback on it was going to be, you know, what does the creator get out of this? But you spell that out for me. Like, okay, they get expanded reach You know, the other thing I found some in a people who have not done sponsorships, advertisements, you know, uh partnership relationships like this before may be resistant to it on the creator side because they want to protect you know that that equity that they've built. But sometimes adding that that advertising, having those sponsorships makes you look more professional, makes you look, you know, adds some validity to it. And it can actually be helpful, assuming, you know, it it makes sense. for the audience.
Brad Hoos • 36:50.680
Yeah, it's gotta be a good fit from both sides. It it is funny. I mean there's plenty of stories out there about creators like faking a Nike partnership and so forth. Generally these are, you know established credible brands and then sometimes these creators will actually get in hot water which does happen, right?
Kurt Elster • 37:06.160
I've heard um Yeah, I read an article probably is probably like over the pandemic that uh high schoolers were were faking sponsorships to impress their friends. Like, oh man, what a weird world.
Brad Hoos • 37:18.760
I know. I know. It is it is weird. It's funny that can actually be bad for brands when one of those creators does get, you know, find themselves involved in a scandal and they have to kind of say, I actually be never partnered. with this with this individual. So it ca it can get get sticky for for sure. But you know, you just gotta do your homework um and you gotta make sure you feel good about a fit with a with a creator. And when you do that, it it really does work well for both parties. I mean, you kind of it's like the classic Venn diagram, what's the overlap in the circle, what's good for the creator. what's good for the brand. And as an agency, I mean, that's really a lot of what we do is troubleshooting and problem solving and trying to really make sure we're finding that spot. Sometimes it's very narrow. Sometimes it's very wide where there's you know value that's created for the brand and the the creator.
Kurt Elster • 38:08.360
Um you're trying to find that fit between like your clients are are the brands. And you're trying to find the right creator for them, what are we looking for?
Brad Hoos • 38:21.160
Yeah, so we so we have the um We have a great position of having a ton of proprietary data as an agency. So I'll walk through that really quickly and then talk about what you can do if you're if you're not working with an agency too, because there's things you can do. So as an agency you know we've been operating for years and years and years and we have a ton of performance data so we're talking about creators who work well we actually can say like look at a creator and say Oh, they are the 85th percentile working with brand X. They are the 70th percentile working with brand Y. They are the 50th percentile working with brand Z. We can see all this data, um, which gives us a very strong competitive advantage to say, hey, this creator has worked really well for brands in the past. And you know, historical performance is the best indicator of future performance, at least from our perspective. So we can identify those creators who worked really well for brands in the past, and we can get very granular with that. Um if you don't you know if you're not in a position to to hire an an agency and you're doing this on your own, here's what you can do. Look for creators that have been renewed by brands on a repeat basis. So Brands are smart. If something's not working with a creator, they're probably not going to renew with that brand. But if you see that they've worked with a creator, excuse me, they've worked the creator has worked with a brand for a year and you dig a little deeper and you find out there's actually three brands they've worked with. for a year, that's a pretty darn good indicator that that creator has the trust of their audience, again, in a world where people hate to be sold to and use ad blockers all the time. So that would be a very good signal that that creator is going to be you know good for you. The the flip side of that is actually like up-and-coming creators, if they haven't done any brand deals, are very, very limited. You know, the the bigger a creator you can get that hasn't done brand deals can be great because the audience really wants to support that Like back in the day it was like, oh, you're selling out. Now it's a celebration. Like, oh amazing. Like congratulations. And they're gonna want to really support Support that creator. But you got to do real homework on that because if someone had tried with like three, four, five, six brands and hadn't been renewed, there's pretty good chance that they're actually just not that effective in moving the needle. for those brands. So that that's sort of a I don't want to call it a hacky, but that's the you know low low-tech way that you can try to get a sense of the creator's perfor ability to perform for brands.
Kurt Elster • 40:57.740
So, okay, I've got if I want to get into this, is there a minimum revenue level I should be at? Because you're like, hey, we worked with AG1. All right, well that's huge. And he said, well, I maybe someone's spending a hundred thousand dollars on an influencer campaign and it's a drop of the bucket. All right. That's a not a drop of the bucket for most of us. Uh but then you've got Muscox Flannel, which I think Did did we say that this is doing a million a year?
Brad Hoos • 41:22.740
Yeah, a little a little bit under a million. Yep.
Kurt Elster • 41:25.140
So we're like, all right, there's a range there. At what point does it make sense?
Brad Hoos • 41:29.940
There's such a wide disparity in terms of when it makes sense.
Kurt Elster • 41:33.220
Like I essentially asked you, hey, what is a house cost?
Brad Hoos • 41:37.300
Well, uh look, here here's what I would say is that there's no reason to not experiment with influencers, but Meaning like you're not going to learn anything if you partner with one influence Like if it does great, you might have just gotten lucky and now if you're you know 10xing your investment and you're like doing the math like you you may not be able to to replicate that. So you want to work with enough creators in testing something that you're going to really be able to learn if something's like a repeatable and scalable. channel. So generally speaking, you know, we're we're working with with brands that we're saying, hey, work work with eight to ten creators as initial starting point. What whatever that may mean. And so if if you're, you know, earlier in your your journey as a merchant, then you can probably go a little bit smaller. You can work to five to six creators and get them just to just to create content and be able to do, you know, creator listing, allow listing, where it's hopefully making your paid social more effective. And if that's the case, then go a little bit wider, maybe get a little bit bigger craters over time, and see if you're able to still keep that, you know, that momentum or that uptick in terms of your conversion rate or your, you know, your um acquisition cost uh or AOV wh whatever metric you're you're seeing that that improvement on and you know keep pushing that envelope So I mean you you can start, I mean uh if you're truly looking for content creation versus influencers, and let me unpack that as distinction quickly. Influencers are people who have influence, meaning they have a following, people care about what they say. Content creators, they develop content, but they don't necessarily have the a big audience. So generally speaking, we say a creator, it's someone who probably has a couple thousand followers, but they do a good job of creating content. You can have them, you know, create a piece of content for you for a couple hundred dollars and um then Um go ahead and and use that for for your paid social. So if you're small, like you could you could get this going for a thousand dollars, right? Where you're working with, you know, four, five, six creators, have them develop the the content, and then put them into your your paid social and you're gonna get a read, you know, pr pretty quickly in terms of how well that's that's working for you. Again, like if you're more mature as a merchant and you gotta have your paid social and paid search humming, that's probably the time to look at working with creators to have them post organically and creators who are at a scale And you probably want to start in like the 50 to 75K of uh an investment with those creators. But same approach, like you'd probably want eight to ten creators, but now you're working with creators who have between like 30,000 and 100,000 views per piece of content where they're truly influencers, as opposed to when we're talking about if you're a smaller merchant and just starting with influencers slash creators, you're probably working with creators who you're paying a couple hundred bucks for for a piece of content with.
Kurt Elster • 44:48.320
The you know, for me, really like you know, we've been talking forty minutes, looking back over our conversation, the standout takeaway for me, my aha moment is is whitelisting. I think that's like the really powerful techni somewhat technical component that especially smaller brands running influencer campaigns may not realize that they're missing out on. So if you're already Ig running these influencer campaigns and you're not whitelisting. That see that I think is the magic ad or push And if you're not doing it at all, now you've given us a framework for getting into it. You find these smaller creators, micro influencers, we used to call them. pay them for pieces of content that you could use on paid social and get like a variety of this great, authentic, good content and start building that relationship. Hmm. Okay. I like that.
Brad Hoos • 45:38.579
I think you nailed it. And I I would just add one thing that we didn't talk a lot about, and I'll be quick on this, is that these collaboration posts? are fairly new. They're doing really well. And so it's another form of the whitelisting, but instead of coming from the creator, it comes from the brand and the creator. It will require a second set of approval, right, in this bit business manager. So first you have to approve the organic post. And then second, both parties would have to approve the paid but behind it. But ultimately it's whitelisting. It just shows up as a collab as opposed to from the the creator And if you're going to invest in whitelisting, I would, you know, definitely encourage folks to also like look at doing the collab posts because they're less common and they're off to a really good start. Um and and I'm pretty bullish on that here in 26.
Kurt Elster • 46:33.700
Beautiful. 100%. Brad, where could people find more about you?
Brad Hoos • 46:38.900
So uh you can visit us at the outloudgroup. com, just uh I guess not the oh maybe it redirects. Sorry. Just the just outloudgroup. com. You you can you know find more about us. We have a whole bunch of information and insights around influencer marketing um on our on our page and and certainly you can you know re- reach out to us and we're always happy to have uh a a chat with with brands to to try to steer you in the right direction in in terms of your influencer work.
Kurt Elster • 47:07.580
Beautiful. Brand who's thank you so much.
Brad Hoos • 47:11.260
Thank you, Kurt. Appreciate it.
Kurt Elster • 47:14.280
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