E72: David Morneau

Richard Hill:
Hi there, I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 72nd episode. In this episode, I speak with David Morneau, managing partner of inBeat Agency, working with thousands of micro-influencers and eCommerce stores around the globe. If you thought influencer marketing was just for the big boys, then listen to this episode. In this episode, we talk the why of influencer marketing. And why am I surprised you at just how small the carts are to get going. Where to find influencers and how to start a project with them? What to pay and how to drive an army of influencers to get behind your product? Stuck for content marketing ideas, unleash your micro-influencer army to fuel your content machine. And finally, we discussed the future of micro-influencers. If you enjoy this episode, please make sure you subscribe. So you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now let's head over to this fantastic episode. How you doing David?

David Morneau:
I'm doing great. Thanks Richard. Thanks for having me here.

Richard Hill:
No problem. I'm looking forward to this one. This is a topic that I don't know too much about. I have to hold my hand up and say, well, we're going to be talking about all things micro-influencer with David today. But I think it'd be good to give our audience a little bit of an intro. Tell us about yourself, tell us about inBeat Agency and how it came about.

David Morneau:
Sure thing. So a couple of years back, we were running an SEO Agency, building back links. The typical kind of outreach back link building, write guest post articles and go through the whole process. And client came to us, told us, "Hey, we'd like to explore micro-influencer marketing." We looked at it, researched it and realized, "Hey, this is pretty much like outreach, right? For link building rights." Build processes around it. Realized there was a great market potential there. We pivoted the entire business now to micro-influencer marketing, and also built software to help us find micro-influencers. And here we are today, just running micro-influencer campaigns for direct to consumer and eCommerce brands. And yeah, that's the one minute story.

Richard Hill:
So you've completely ditched SEO, the link building the outreach for link building purposes and 100% on outreach? Well, it's... sorry, micro-influencer marketing.

David Morneau:
Yeah, that's right. Exactly.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess we'll get into it. But I guess it's a similar thing in that you are reaching out to people and negotiating something with them. And in this instance, let's maybe get into that. So maybe just for the audience's benefit, what's your definition of a micro-influencer? I think he probably has a couple of guys. It doesn't have, I think he's got this... People think, obviously influencer all this big celebrity status. But when we're talking about micro-influencers, I'm guessing there's a few variations of that.

David Morneau:
Yeah. So we have the loose definition of on Instagram, 10,000 to 50,000 followers. On TikTok, we consider micro-influencer as a hundred thousand to 250,000 follower. Those are just a loose kind of terms that we use in terms of follower account. Usually it means that they don't have an agent representing them, which is probably the biggest distinctive factor that you're dealing directly with the influence or not with an agent or an agency. So that's really what we consider micro-influencers when we represent our clients in this kind of world.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah. So you're dealing directly with somebody that's probably up and coming.

David Morneau:
Exactly.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Like everybody, even the big boys and girls, they start somewhere but they have got the millions. These guys and girls are building their own brand, personal brand or company brand more and more and more, I guess, personal brand. And you're sort of getting an opportunity to work with them at a level that's a bit more realistic and a bit more in touch with most people's budgets. Would you say is that?

David Morneau:
Yeah. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And if the collaboration costs are much more realistic, you've got content creators in there that are really good. So, you can get good content for... It's yeah. The economics on it make a lot more sense. And it's a buyer's market in the sense that there's a lot of creators creating content. It's been democratize and there are so many good traders now out there trying to reach that macro-influencers celebrity status. But all these people going upwards are looking to get their name out there, get paid at least while they're doing it. So that's really big opportunity for both eCommerce and the brands.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I can see that. So... Okay. eCommerce store doing a couple of million pounds or $3 million depending on...

David Morneau:
Yeah. Thanks for the conversion.

Richard Hill:
Or is it 10 million dollars, I don't know [Crosstalk 00:04:39] conversion rates.

David Morneau:
The pound seems a lot right? It's always like...

Richard Hill:
I always joke about it. It's like, "Yeah. It's like a million pounds and then about it's about $20 million." Isn't it? It's [crosstalk 00:04:49]. I think it's about [crosstalk 00:04:51] I checked it yesterday. It's 1.38. 1.38. So a million dollars is 1.4 million basically. Yeah.

David Morneau:
Yes. The exchange rate is pretty good for you guys.

Richard Hill:
So you're doing that. And then let's say you're doing that a couple of million dollars maybe as a... and you've not used influencers, micro-influencers, what would you say to those guys listening and thinking, "That's not for me. Or I'm not sure about that?" Why should it eCom store doing a couple of million dollars a year use micro-influencers?

David Morneau:
So there's three things, right? There's really three things while you should use micro-influencers if you even consider it. And the first one is really just driving sales and awareness, right? That's the standard way of seeing it. That's how people are used to seeing it. The second way is to create content right for your paid media. So I'm guessing a lot of your audience is probably running a lot of paid media. And they're looking for ways to scale that paid media while having a network of micro-influencers is a great way to create that user generated content or influencer generated content. And you can really create some great ads from them on an ongoing basis. The third way is market insights, right? Asking the influencers specific questions while you're working with them. Based on how could we position our product? What should we release next? What are the trends and so forth, right? And just get market insights to get ideas sparked up and find a new direction to go in with marketing. So those are the three ways we see people using micro-influencer marketing.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah. I think the one particularly what resonates with me... creating the content. You're running paid ads. You're running Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and that creator can get tired very, very quickly. Currently people get very, very tired and that fatigue. If you have fatigue, no matter what you set on Facebook, if you're not changing out your creative, whereas if you've got a piece of content from a third party that so a micro-influencer and you can slice and dice that up in different ways. It's obviously something very, very different to what you're probably doing normally if you did especially if you're starting this journey. So, I really like the idea around using a third party for your content rather than maybe your own team or your own... The norm that you would do.

Richard Hill:
So, okay. So maybe the guys listening, I think in general, let's give this a go. I think this is something we need to start looking at. That sort of resonates. I'm sure it will resonate with a lot of people that listened to the podcast. They're at that point where they're, I think a lot of our listeners are running ads, particularly when we to go down the ad route, there's a lot. I know we've got a lot of followers that listen to the podcast on ads, around ads, particularly Facebook ads and Google ads but on the Facebook ad side of things. Okay. So let's get started. We want to make a start and we want to find those influencers. What's a good way to find influencers in certain niches? What's the best way to reach out to those people?

David Morneau:
Yeah. First thing to do is really just look into your current followers. You might have some great influencers in there already that have bought from your brand and already have... And actually liked your brand already. So, that's really the first place to start. And After that, typical Instagram manual search will be through hashtags. You can use a tool. We've built a tool for that. And that's what we use internally. But you can use... If you're starting out looking to test the waters, manual search is more than enough. Just look through hashtags, find decent content, look for influencers that have... If you're looking strictly for content, you could even look at the micro and nano side of things where 3000 followers is completely fine for you as long as the content is good and they match what you're looking for. So, that's where I'd start searching. Build a C list of like, 20 to a 100 creators, outreached them all. And...

Richard Hill:
[crosstalk 00:08:42] so you're looking at certain follower accounts. I mean, you mentioned a certain follower account right? At the beginning. Is there a certain follower account you'd maybe start with?

David Morneau:
Yeah. So I mean, tactically like influencers profile actually, what's called the profiles. And at that point with 1000 or less followers, don't have an email associated with them. You can be on that outreach to them. We don't like DM at all. It's really hard to work around, there's limits and so forth. So we look for profiles that have emails with 1000 views, let's say 50,000 followers for content creation strictly if that's our only goal and that's how we'd go at it. Then we judged them strictly on content quality. So how good is their content is the metric we actually will... Not the metric, but the criteria that we actually look at. So, okay. Can they create good ads for us? And that's what we'll be looking at.

Richard Hill:
There's a few things. So we're looking at follow account number obviously, but there might be some variance on that if we really like the content. But ultimately they want to be producing quality content that fits with your brand, your audience, obviously this person, or this brand or person is going to be representing you sort of thing in a content piece or a post. So does it fit with what you're about? Any tools and software that you'd recommend to try and find those 1000 to 50,000, and then the certain interests and hashtags? Any sort of go-to tool you'd recommend?

David Morneau:
Of course, full disclosure, right? We own an operating inBeat software, which is a software component, which is a tool you can use. But we have competitors that are dragged as well. We have Heepsy, Monash is another good tool. So they're great tools as well. We of course we use our tool, but... yeah.

Richard Hill:
So the guys [crosstalk 00:10:24] that are listening want to have a look at your tool, what's the best way to do that? What's the URL for that?

David Morneau:
inBeat.co is the URL for that. And then just sign up for free. You're going to get access to a limited database access. And we've got... yeah. That's exactly how it gets started.

Richard Hill:
So, okay. We found some influencers to make a start with. They tick the boxes. They have a certain follower account, they're in our industry, we like what they're about. We like their brand, their personal brand. They're going to fit with our product. But then we've got to reach out to them. Haven't we? So how do we... What's a typical... It's like, "Oh." What sort of... Talk me through how that works? And then also, I guess two-pronged question really. How does that work? What sort of thing would our listeners reach out and say? And then the pricing. What's the sort of pricing you think is... [crosstalk 00:11:26] is there any sort of framework for pricing that you can talk about?

David Morneau:
Yeah, let's unpackage that, right? So, first of all, you want to reach out, Colby mailing tool, Mailshake, whatever you want the Colby mailing tool to manage that. Simplify the kind of bulk outreach part of the process. What you want to do in terms of pricing, is really create a creative brief. So what I recommend doing with that is just go Facebook ads library, and look at your competitors. Look at parallel industries. How are they creating content, right? And then build a mood board of all the content that they've been running forever. So what does that UGC look like that's been running and performing for them, right? Build a mood board with that. Send out to the influencers. Give them some creative guidelines. "Here's what we want you to include. Here's our unique selling propositions we want you to put forward." Whatever it is, just put them in a video and then just send it out to a hundred creators.

David Morneau:
And then just look at what they're proposing you in terms of pricing. And this will vary greatly, right? And then you're going to be able to identify the best prices. I'd recommend just depending on your industry, who you're targeting. If you're targeting an older audience, 25 to 34 year olds, we'll charge more than 18 to 24 year old. That's just the way it is. So really the pricing will be all over the place. But if you pitch a hundred that have good content and that match your criteria, you're going to get a really good idea for price in general.

David Morneau:
So a video can cost you a couple of hundred dollars. Can even cost you a hundred dollars. But it can also cost you a thousand dollars. It really depends on what you're asking of these creators. And then well we have to understand is that, this micro-influencer thing is really a numbers game. You're going to get some bad content back and that's going to happen. It's just going to happen, right? What you are looking for is to get good content out of that number, then you're just finding out [crosstalk 00:13:09].

Richard Hill:
Just like the link building game, isn't it? You going to get...

David Morneau:
Exactly.

Richard Hill:
You're going to reach out to 100 and 20 will say, "yeah." But you think, "Hang on a minute, we probably shouldn't have reached out to them in the first place." [crosstalk 00:13:17] support and then you get better at it. You build that team or you build that process, or obviously you engage a company like yourself to do that for you and you just learn the process. But what we're saying is, we can identify them and reach out to them for probably a hundred bucks and try things.

Richard Hill:
There's a start point. Now say, if we go to a bit more of the other end of the scale, and this probably leads onto my next question, quite nicely. Obviously you've got these macro-influencers, these bigger macro-influencers, and we've obviously got listeners on this show that have got a lot bigger budgets. They're spending a hundred grand, 200 grand a month on Facebook and a half a million pound on shopping and whatever may be. But then maybe they're not doing influencer marketing, but they want to go 10 grand a month, what sort of advice would you give to them?

David Morneau:
In in terms of influencer marketing as an acquisition channel? If you've got 10, 20 grand, you're going to be able to treat it as an acquisition channel while you're also getting content, right? Because you're scaling up your budget and that this holds true for up to 50 grand and beyond, right, in terms of monthly budget. But the way we go at it with clients, is that we kind of create a front layer where we pitched tons of influencers. We give them a chance on a kind of collaboration where we'll pay X amount on a collaboration set of KPI, x amount of followers, this engagement rate, etc. We try to have a benchmark on what a good influencer is and what it isn't. We look at the content quality of course. And then we just have them posts, right? And we see, okay, well, what kind of numbers are they getting?

David Morneau:
How many clients are they generating? And then after we have sales figure for each influencer is the one that are performing really well because you're going to have an outlier distribution where some influencers are going to be... It's always the 80-20 principle, right? 20% of your influencers will be driving 80% of the sales on the sales channel. So we identified these faults and we collaborate with them on an ongoing basis, right? And then we start treating them as what we call ambassadors, right? It's just long-term collaborations with influencers. And we try to make them kind of our advocates and build that relationship with them and pay them for collaborations and so forth. Now, if you've got an influencer that's generating zero sales, but their content is absolutely stunning then you can make a trade-off. Say, "Okay, well, this person we're going to work with to create content, but we're not to work with them to drive sales."

David Morneau:
Right? And then that's completely fine. One of the hidden things of micro-influencer marketing is that these people aren't business operators, right? Ease of communication should be in your criteria to do actually select good influencers, right? Some of them are extremely hard to collaborate with. They disappear, they come back. It's just, ease of communication is extremely, extremely important. And I can't stress this enough. You're going to get people that are just impossible to work with, right? And that's just time-sucking and it takes a lot of time for your team to manage.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I liked the idea there that, I think you might not directly be able to assign a value to some of what they're doing for you. But if they're creating amazing content that you can use in other areas of the business where you probably can track more or they're just creating amazing content, obviously the value of that is potentially insane depending on what end of the scale you're out selling. That's great. That's great.

David Morneau:
Yeah. There's something powerful there to just share a drive folder with tons of assets to your paid media retention team, email marketing, and just all this content that everyone across the organization can use onboarding. And it's beautiful, right? To just have that. Your social media team will be happy as well. Just like creating that kind of social media calendar becomes so much easier when you have access and all that content on a consistent basis.

Richard Hill:
Love it. So obviously we're talking about a hundred dollars or $20,000, but I think what's your take on, what should a company pay versus send free stuff? I think quite often we see influencers promoting products because they got sent those products or wearing those products or whether it's makeup or when... What's your sort of thoughts on that? Or is there a balance between the two?

David Morneau:
So it really depends on your brand equity. Like how cool is your brand, right? That's probably where it's going to make or break this model, right? If you've got, we work with this fashion retailer, Wild Fang. They've got such a big brand equity. It's just people just love their stuff, it becomes extremely easy to just get ambassadors onboard, hyped up and just loving everything, posts and about us and so forth, right? And it's just it's [inaudible 00:17:58]. If your brand is cool, then it becomes a lot easier to do this. And then you can probably get away with paying less for the influencer and whatnot. It really depends how you're going to structure these deal. And again, it will depend on how much is the product you're giving your influencer rewards, right? If you're 10, $15 cell phone accessory, which we have a client that does exactly that, right? Well, different.

David Morneau:
The relationship is going to be extremely different because the perceived value from the influencer side is lower, right? In a sense that it's only a cell phone accessories. So if you can... Don't get me wrong. You can find ways to be creative about that. Create unique collections only for the influencer, right? And so forth where you can just add more perceived value. Your goal is to augment that the more perceived value you can create, the lower dollar value you do have to pay these influencers, right? And that's really how you can play that. But there's no definite answer. But what that looks like.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a mix, isn't it? So obviously you've worked on a lot of different campaigns. I love the fact you come from this SEO outreach. I can really relate to that. We've been doing that in our business now for many, many, many years. And, but I'm really keen to delve into some maybe very specific campaigns, if you can get specific or specific as you can get. Talk us through a campaign that you've worked on. Give our listeners some real insight into the flow of a campaign.

David Morneau:
Sure, sure thing. So essentially like on an implementation side, right? I mentioned earlier, we will do outreach based on persona that our clients will accept. In that case, the outreach looks something like, "Okay, well, who's our influencer? Who follows this influencer?" And then, "Okay, let's go from there." Then we outreach these influencers. We have this one client called [inaudible 00:19:47], where I think we have 2000 ambassadors, right? That we've vetted as DVIPs, right? What it looks like is we've probably sent product to 8,000 influencers, right? But tons of them been post that's a matter though, because the cost of good on this product is so low. And then we retained the top tier influencers and we can activate them. Now we have a new collection release, activate them, send them all three product cost of goods is so low.

David Morneau:
Shipping is low on that as well. So it just becomes you have a network of ambassadors that you can just activate on an ongoing basis. And that's really the way we go at it. So tons of outreach. And then after that vetting and then after that [inaudible 00:20:26] to make sure they post it, they don't post just blacklists them forget about them. If they post, awesome. What was the engagement that they drive sales, awesome. They drove sales, their content was great, cool. That's fantastic.

David Morneau:
Let's keep them. And then we just end up with a network of a couple of thousand ambassadors that we can activate. Of course, when we activate the entire brand, a bunch of influencers, not all of them will go and post, right? That's just not how it is, but we can probably get 500, 600 kind of people hyped up about it. And yeah, that's exactly the playbook from a to Z. So kind of vet them as they go through the phase, end up with a final product, which is like you're a small army essentially of ambassadors that you can use to [crosstalk 00:21:07] and activate.

Richard Hill:
I like that. It sounds like [crosstalk 00:21:12].

David Morneau:
well, I mean, from my perspective, right, some people will look at it very differently. I look at it from like a, what are the stages and what did we end up with as the final product? So...

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So obviously once you've done a piece of work with an influencer and they are strong, you're building your army, like you saying. I really like that sort of analogy. Same with, in the PR business and in the sort of outreach business, which is a very, very similar, same thing, isn't it? You're building that army of influencers and some are better than others. Some will be poor and won't do anything. You'll maybe send them the thing. And obviously some will be amazing. Some will be variations, but then you'll be able to grade them, maybe.

Richard Hill:
And so I know right out of those 200 that we work with, we've actually got 10 potential ambassadors, people that are really, really behind the brand. Do what they say they're going to do. Really go the extra mile and do an extra video or extra whatever it may be. And maybe then you've got the next tier of 20 or 30 that are pretty good and do X, Y, and then you're grading them [crosstalk 00:22:19] yep. And then you'll know that you can call on the army. So I think, right, we're doing this right. We'll go to these 10 first, then these 30 and you go in and your order. Then you build and build and build. And very much like the outreach business that we have within our SEO business.

David Morneau:
That's exactly the game. That's the game. And then you... Exactly. I mean, if you need a hundred to identify 10 SEO, then get a thousand and you'll have a hundred SEO right? That's essentially how we see it.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's great. That's great. So I think I would say that a lot of people that listen to podcasts, maybe aren't doing much with influencer marketing. So I think they should try and I think obviously they can reach out to you and we'll obviously link everything up at the end as well. But I think there's a lot there for people to start with and move through. But what do you see? Let's say, we're sat here in 18 months time, and we've got you on again, what are we going to be talking about that? And what is the future of... I'd like to do like a five year, 10 year, because that's ridiculous in our game. But 18 months from now, what do you see influencer marketing? What are the sort of things we're going to have are going to become more commonplace?

David Morneau:
Yeah. So I mean, a couple things that I'm going to... I think are going to be growing exponentially is, the community aspect of it, right? We hear that word being tossed around now more and more, right? And then building a community of micro-influencers it's probably going to be a huge asset in micro-influencers and they're wrapped together on both on different product launches and so forth, right? So where we have a community of them working together. And now that will be a big challenge for brands that don't have a hobby as the centre play meaning like gardening, for instance. But if you're selling gardening product, people that do gardening are hyped up about gardening and they will easily interact with one another about gardening. And there's an easier community to create their whys and Phone Loops is much harder, right?

David Morneau:
It's a cell phone accessory. It's hard to gather people around a cell phone accessory. Not saying that it's not doable, but you need to be creative. So community is going to be a big aspect. Paid media is going to be. Influencer marketing is going to be more and more at the center of paid media. Just makes a lot of sense in that. You can help source these centralized your content creation. And the dream of testing 50, a hundred different creatives in a month becomes quite easy, right?

David Morneau:
We're talking to different audiences, right? You can say, "We want female 25 to 34 that likes yoga or whatever," right? And you can just get those creators that match exactly that use case. And then you can just get them to create content. So that's going to be huge, right? In terms of decentralizing content creation. That's where we're taking the business in terms of where we're going as an agency. We're building a platform to just get creators in there and pop into your creators that can create ads that know how to create ads and how to create branded content. That's where we're taking it. So I think that's really going to be where the micro-influencer movement is going. And so that's-

Richard Hill:
It's exciting. [crosstalk 00:25:23]. Very exciting. Isn't it? I like it. Yeah. Yeah. It's making me think a lot about our agency. We're always the... Certain size of the agency, but that's... Yeah. Something, I think we should talk more off camera, I think.

David Morneau:
Yeah, sure thing I would love to. And from our side, right, it really becomes what's our advantage as an agency if we go into that metagame and it's like, well, we work with 25,000 influencers at this point, right? 25,000 plus micro-influencers right across there. So it's like, well, we know who the top 1% is. We worked with them, right? We know who our top. So tons of great content, put them in a platform and give access to them in a kind of dashboard where direct consumer brand comes in and says, "I want three TikTok ads, 10 pictures for this launch and just click order." And then boom, we match you with some top tier creators. We know who's good. We know who isn't. We know who's reliable. And we feel like that's our edge at this point.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. You're speeding the process. So with quality in effect. Yeah. That's great.

David Morneau:
Exactly.

Richard Hill:
That's great. So, that's fantastic. I think that's been a brilliant episode. I always like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. You've got a book you'd recommend to our listeners, David.

David Morneau:
I think actually I got your email about that. I was thinking about it and I... So what did I really... I mean, of course like the E-Myth was probably one those things that is for someone that's number driven in terms of operations. It makes a lot of sense to read that book kind of a game changer. I've read it way back. And it was one of those books that just clicked. It clicked. Right. You read it. You're like, "Oh, wow, okay. That's what a great business look right." In terms of... And I'm pretty sure that you've already had that book recommendation on this-

Richard Hill:
About eight times I think. But hey, it's [crosstalk 00:27:09] okay.

David Morneau:
Exactly. But I mean it's-

Richard Hill:
It's a classic-

David Morneau:
Game changer book, to be honest. Exactly. I just get to thinking in a different kind of mental framework and it's fantastic. Yeah.

Richard Hill:
Well, it's been an absolute blast having you on the show. For the listeners that want to find out more about you David, and more about the agency, what's the best place and the best way to do that?

David Morneau:
So inBeat Agency, you can book a time right there with me. Or you can add me on LinkedIn, David Morneau. M-O-R-N-E-A-U. Yeah. It's a French name. So, and then... Yeah, that's it.

Richard Hill:
Great. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on the show, David. I look forward to catching up again and we'll see if those predictions come through in 18 months. Thank you for listening to the eCom@One, eCommerce Podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe and don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter that leaves a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here, eComOne. the eCommerce Marketing Agency.