Van Oakes shares with Philipp Schoeffmann his do’s and don’ts of social media influencer marketing, and more at Affiliate World Europe 2018 in Barcelona.

Interview with Van Oakes | CMO, DieselSellerz

By Philipp Schoeffmann

Interview Transcript

Phil:
Let’s start off with what you just shared onstage. Maybe the three main takeaways. What should people really, really, really look into?
Van:
Don’t give up on influencer marketing. The biggest thing with influencers is that you want their organic traffic. They’re worth the organic traffic if you’re copying post IDs down. You want that traffic on your ad to basically, not trick, but basically feed Facebook’s algorithm with a lot of engagement. Facebook is going to say like, “Dude, this is super popular. Let’s give it really cheap CPMs“
Phil:
Right, just – sorry, don’t mean to interrupt. Just to get this straight. So what you actually do is, you have your ad?
Van:
Yes.
Phil:
And you use the influencer’s ad account actually?
Van:
Yes.

Influencers Supercharging Your Ad’s Post ID

Phil:
You use the same ad ID and push it through their ad account?
Van:
Yes. So if you can get permission to run from their page, do it.
But a lot of times when I did what I spoke on, I wasn’t running on an influencer’s ad account. I was running from our own business page but I was using the same post ID all the way down. So when the influencer shared my post, it had the same post ID going down. And then all that does is create all the engagement. Then later on, in step two of my process is when the influencer makes the video.

Key: Make Social Media Influencers Keep It Real

Biggest takeaway of that is it needs to be raw. It needs to be a live, 9:16 raw video of the actual influencer just talking about your product. Don’t do a professional one. Their followers want to see their face. So don’t just give them one of your company’s video and say, “Hey post this on your page“. You’re wasting your money.
Phil:
So, take their phone, show your product if it’s a physical product. How could you do that with a digital product?
Van:
What I said onstage, if it’s a SaaS or if it’s a digital product, have them pull the web page up or whatever and say, “Oh I love this,” Just have them using your product in some way, shape or form. Instead of him just getting on the screen and saying, “I really like this platform“. Have them on the platform.

Create You Custom Audiences & Remarket

Phil:
Right. Okay, so they have a video, they share that. Okay. Is there a third step?
Van:
Yeah, third step is the remarketing. So, everybody should be remarketing already. But when you use an influencers’ video and it’s a 60-second video, you’re going to get a lot of views because they’ve got all these fans. Everybody is going to watch their stuff. And that creates an audience of all these people. so when you create your custom audiences of 95% video views, the people who have watched 75%, 50%, they’re strong. And those are the people you remarket to. That you hit again. And that’s where your big grow is. That’s where your big return is.

Step Three: It’s Your Brands Time To Shine

Phil:
Okay and then with those custom audiences or lookalikes, I assume based on those. You don’t really need the influencer for that anymore right? So that’s the beauty of it.
Van:
No, the third step is just you, that’s your company’s video. It can be fancy. It can be whatever. Because by now, all these people are familiar with your brand. They already know who you are, when initially they didn’t. So you needed to use the influencer.
Phil:
Okay, alright. So how much of your business success would you say lies within using influencers? How much lies within using Facebook or other channels?
Van:
Yeah, so I’m primarily just Facebook. That’s really my forte. We have other people that work for us that do the Adwords and do everything else. That’s just not my strong suit so I’ll stick with what I do.

Mixing Facebook Ads With Influencers

I do Facebook and we were, I would say 90% of our money was just going into Facebook ads in general before I had got there. And then when I got there I just kind of mixed the influencers with the Facebook. And that’s when things kind of took off. Because when you start mixing the two and you put a popular face on a Facebook ad, it explodes real quick. The real big hitters are guys who know what they’re doing
Phil:
So how would you then find those influencers?
Van:
I spoke about it and I spoke about it in the thing. There’s a bunch of platforms you can get on and look and find influencers. But I promise you those guys, the real big hitters are guys who know what they’re doing.

Contacting Your Desired Social Media Influencer

You should know your niche and you should be able to identify who are the top players anyways and just DM them. Literally I send them a DM. I send them emails. I send their friends DMs. I will literally —
Phil:
Knock on their doors.
Van:
Yes, yes. I’ll send everybody.
Phil:
Anyways, okay so you direct message influencers. You know those influencers because you know your niche. And then you just strike a deal with them directly.
Van:
Yeah and usually I give them a package. I usually want them to give me. I want them to share my post first. I want them to share my company before they post an ad about my company. There’s nothing worse than seeing an influencer just post a video of a company at the bottom it’s like #ad. It’s a waste of money. So the first step of the process is if an influencer is going to share your company’s post so that all of their fans — and he’s going to say, “I really like what this company is doing,” so it’s an organic type of process. So that the second time that he posts his actual, his video, they already know the company. They already know that he found this company. That he likes this company and now. He’s endorsing this company.
Phil:
But it’s interesting that you mentioned the #ad or however they put it. And I see that more and more.

Optimizing Social Media Influencer Campaigns

But do your influencers usually do that? Do they mark it as a sponsored post or they don’t? Or how would it influence the results of the campaign.
Van:
I don’t ever have my people just do, “Oh ad, this is an ad“. Like I use my influencers through my ad accounts. And I use them even when I hire people that are way outside, not in my core group of people that I work with in the diesel community. I still get the same thing from them. I want a shared post. I want a video from you. I want a Facebook post. I want an Instagram post. And that I want swipe-ups. I want three swipe-ups from you. And that’s the package that I ask from all my influencers. That way I have so much ammo to use. When I get all of this content, I basically have three weeks of these three steps to do.
Phil:
Alright and then so when you do that, do you usually work with like just one or two influencers at a time? Or like during a big product launch?
Van:
Yeah so I work a bunch of different influencers on the specific campaign that I was talking about. That was two influencers at the same time. I had one guy pushing, I had another guy pushing towards the same, exact campaign, same post IDs, everything. I just used two different faces. One of the influencers has a different following of people. One of the influencers has a different one. And all I want, is I just want engagement in my ads that I can retarget. I just want to get all of their followers to know my brand so that I can retarget them.

What is the Biggest Opportunity in Influencer Marketing

Phil:
Alright, well that’s fantastic. I have a last question. So that was perfect information about social media influencer marketing. What do you think are the biggest opportunities of the people here? So is it actually worth working with influencers like that? Should they look into something else? What would you recommend?
Van:
I’m all on board for the influencer marketing. It’s going to be there forever and I think as Facebook and as the algorithms change a little bit, it’s going to get higher and higher CPMs. It’s only going to get more expensive. And the only way to counteract that is find people with organic reach. Even though they’re taking away that organic reach they still have a ton of people that see stuff for free.
Phil:
Fanstastic. Well that was very valuable.
Van:
Thank you.