• That is a great question. We are running fairly large volume of campaigns between 60 and 75 campaigns a week happening generally. We select influencers in a few ways. The way we talk about this stuff is art and science. We always see the two sides of every coin. On the science side, we are looking at data, we're looking at your growth numbers, we're looking at your follower health, we're looking at your engagement rates. We're looking at all of that data. We're looking at, what kind of brands that you talk about? What is your average percentage of sponsored posts in your feed? All of these numbers and all this data, we're looking at those things to try and slim down from the 60,000 people who are on the platform down to a number that's a little bit more manageable.

    We know a client needs somebody in New York City who has an Instagram following of 50,000 people. They need to be authentic beauty fans who talk about beauty but are also luxury. We have a number of ways that we can use data to find who hits those key points. From there, that's when the art side of it comes in. Then our account managers are actually looking at these accounts, we're looking through your feeds and trying to understand, would you be a good fit for the client that we are working for?

    We try and bring new influencers into the fold as much as possible. We are always pushing ourselves to look at every new person who signs up, to bring new people into the platform that we're really excited about. When we work with you in the first time, if it is a good experience, that experience is usually shared throughout the team. If we worked with someone that it was a really good experience, that account manager would say, "Hey, just so you guys know, I worked with this person on this campaign. They were a dream. If you have any work coming up that makes sense with them, you should kick it their way."

    Which leads to my second point, which is, the easiest way to differentiate yourself with us when working on a campaign is being professional. It's being timely, being easy to work with, doing what you say you're going to do and just being a reasonable partner. It doesn't matter how beautiful your content is. If you're a nightmare to work with, we will do everything in our power to not work with you. Because we have so many things going on, because the team is so busy, it's just not worth our time to have to chase you up if we know we can work with another influencer who is going to be on top of things and we don't have to chase up.

    I say it over and over again, but I cannot stress enough how important things like being prompt on email and doing the things that you said you were going to do are in working with us. It's not super complex stuff. We're not asking for the moon here. If you answer your emails and do what you're supposed to do, and of course, if you have some vision and you're good at your job and you can create some beautiful content that we feel like is impactful, that's baseline, easiest way to continue to work with us.

    The other thing is, build a relationship. We are a platform and we do lean on technology to help us make these decisions because we have so many of them to make, but at the end of the day, there's a roomful of people behind me that are working on this stuff. Those people can be swayed by things that aren't numbers as well. If you go to the about page, their pictures and email addresses are all there. It's not that hard to find who these people are, it's not that hard to reach out and introduce yourself.

    I'm not going to tell you the names of the people that work on the execution team because it should be fairly easy. If there's 10 other companies like us, you should go email them as well and introduce yourself and say hi. We always say that if you want to work with a brand, the only thing standing between you and that reality is probably one person. It's just getting to know one person and convincing them. Same thing on our team. Now, there's more than one person who's doing it, but building a personal relationship always works.

    If you haven't had a campaign with us, we hear it all the time, people have been on the platform for years and they haven't gotten a campaign. There's only so much work. We would love to execute every influencer campaign in the world and that's certainly the goal, but until then, we have our campaigns that we're working on. We have 60,000 influencers on the platform and 500 to 1,000 new ones signing up every week. There is only so much work to go around. It does not say anything about you if you haven't gotten the work. It might even be that we just haven't found the right client.

    There's a lot of more sport and adventure-focused influencers who we love, who we can't work with because we haven't had the clients yet. There are photographers and illustrators in the platform that we love, that we haven't been able to work with because we don't have the right projects. Just because you haven't worked with us doesn't mean you're not on a short list of people that we really want to work with. When we find the right project, if you stay top of mind, much better chance of getting that deal down the line.

    The other thing is that we have two sides of our business. We've got the campaigns that we manage and then we have a self-serve platform that hundreds of clients use to do this on their own, and so a pretty good chance that you're going to events and getting gifted things and working on campaigns with brands through Fohr and you just have no idea that that's where they found you. We control a decent amount of the fashion beauty space in terms of a technology tool to help brands do this on their own. I bet a lot of times when influencers say, "I've never worked with you," I say, "Well, let's rattle off some of your recent collaborations." They say a brand, that's a client. Brand, that's a client, that's a client. A lot of the times, they're working through us, they just don't know it.
    Episode #121
    - Campaign Selections, Insights Reporting, Influencer Products