Gretta van Riel discusses with Philipp Schoeffmann just how to harness the power of Instagram and influencer marketing, and more at at Affiliate World Europe 2018 in Barcelona.

Interview with Gretta van Riel | Founder & Partner Skinny Me Tea, The 5th Watches, Hey Influencers

By Philipp Schoeffmann

Interview Transcript

Phil:
Is it actually true that you have generated $1 million in sales in one single day?
Gretta:
Yes, this is true. That was with my company The 5th watches. And we operated on quite a different model to the usual companies. We were exclusive based on time rather than on price. So basically what we did was we sold our watches for five days a month, on the fifth of each month. It was a time-limited sales model. That FOMO was really useful in building it up as well as just basic principles and marketing psychology around scarcity and exclusivity and social proofs. It was really interesting because through more scarcity and exclusivity, we were able to increase the demand of the product and its perceived value. Watches, especially, as a direct-to-consumer product, it’s a very saturated market. And we were able to differentiate ourselves through our model rather than our product. Actually over $232,000 of that million-dollar day was generated in our first one minute of sales. They were able to do things like pre-load their cart. So what happened with the model was we redesigned the entire brand experience around that model. That’s the way that we kind of would gear up toward launches throughout the month.

Building Hype: Collecting Sign-Ups Not ATC’s

For example, we’d replace call to actions on our website. Like the add to cart call to action was replaced with a sign-up call to action. And you could enter your email right below a product almost like “mentally buying” it at the time. There was just this huge buyer intent from our entire waitlist because of the way the entire brand was structured and the brand experience was structured. So it was just this big kind of mind play but in a nice way because we were able to build such authentic relationships with our community because for 25 days a month we weren’t doing what every other brand was doing everyday trying to push sales down your throat basically. We could build this really authentic relationship with our customers for that 25 days and then when it came to sales, it just was the logical choice to convert.
Phil:
I’ve so many questions about that. But first of all, this is Gretta van Riel. That’s absolutely amazing, how long have you built out that funnel before you actually launched? That’s taking quite some risk. Obviously, it has worked out for you. But it needs some investment in time and resources, right, to first do that.

Market-Product Fit Versus Product-Market Fit

Gretta:
Yeah, of course. I was a bit of a seasoned e-commerce entrepreneur already. This is not a product and not a model that I would suggest for maybe a first-timer. It was quite an advanced strategy and it took a lot of audience building basically. Our main thing was building a really engaged audience before we launched. And this is this concept that I talk about that I call “market-product fit” rather than “product-market fit” because the market should always come before the product. Then you’re able to develop and match that product to that market.
Phil:
So how would I do that?

The Three Cs of Instagram

Gretta:
With Instagram, there’s the three Cs of Instagram. There’s content, there’s collaboration, and there’s consistency. In terms of content, it’s posting valuable content the audience wants to see. Of course, that sounds like a really, really obvious thing to say but at the same time, a really good way that you can actually identify the types of content the audience wants to see through what I call creating content pillars and weighting your pillars accordingly to that. Then, collaboration. It was moreso collaborating with key influencers in the industry. There’s also mutually beneficial relationships as well. So whether that is a brand partnership, where you collaborate to do a giveaway together or it could be in terms of mutually shouting each other out on Instagram. You can kind of trade reach in that way. In terms of consistency, the main thing that you want to focus on here is not just being consistent because you’re told that that’s what you’re meant to do. It works on that level in terms of memorability or top-of-mind or front-of-mind positioning with your audience to be everywhere so they’re always seeing you. There’s that omnipresent kind of effect. But also, on Instagram, your account is actually penalised if you don’t post frequently enough. Frequency is one of the main factors that identify how much organic reach you’re getting.

Organic + Paid Traffic = $$$

Phil:
So, absolutely stunning, I’ve learned so much already. How would you actually combine or do you combine all that organic traffic you’re generating with paid social? If you do.
Gretta:
So you’ll find that when you do start to run paid campaigns to these kind of organically-built, warmed-up audiences, they’re just going to convert so much better than trying to just convert cold traffic and then wondering why, you know, either you have a bad churn or whether you don’t have a great re-buy rate. So building that brand, building that good will through more organic marketing. And supplementing that with your paid, of course you have to do paid at the same time. They’re just different channels. I guess I’m here, at this conference, here in general, to speak more about what I know best, which is the more organic side of the marketing but that is not to say at all that we don’t run paid campaigns as well.

How To Start With Influencer Marketing

Phil:
If somebody is just starting out with influencer marketing. No matter if it’s just a newbie in general or just starting out in that area. Help them out. How would somebody start with influencer marketing?
Gretta:
Yeah, well I think the most crucial part of influencer marketing is obviously finding the right influencers to collaborate with.  So in terms of the right fit for your brand. And I think the one mistake that brands make here is over-prioritising reach in that equation. So I like to think of it again, I like my three-letter acronyms, there’s three Rs here. There’s reach, there’s relevancy and there’s relationships. So reach is in terms of the influencers following, maybe even their engagement and the reach that a particular post is going to get. Relevancy is the niche of the influencer, which is just really important to make sure that they’re the right fit in terms of brand alignment for you as well. And relevancy can take into account their content style as well. So you want to pick influencers that have quite a similar content style to your brand because if you think of your influencer marketing campaign like a funnel, in a way, the influencer posts then get that lead or that person bounce across to your brand’s profile. And then the last one is relationships, which is just the most important thing in the whole of influencer marketing. So here, I’m talking about the relationship an influencer has with their audience but at the same time, the relationship that you’re able to build with your influencers is crucial to that as well.

There’s More To It Than Influencer Engagement

Phil:
So not just pure engagement?
Gretta:
Yeah, not just getting on there, posting, leaving and then going away. You have to engage to see engagement as an influencer. So getting on, answering some of the audience’s questions, hosting lives, doing Q&A’s, doing meet-ups, things like that really build that audience relationship and that emotional connection with the influencer. Because at the end of the day, that is what converts best in influencer marketing. It’s the form of emotional marketing because you have that tie. You already like this person, therefore you trust them. They have more credibility.  And this trust is able to kind of unlock and scale brand equity at unprecedented heights. So it’s pretty exciting.

Identifying Your Influencer Marketing Strategy

Phil:
Well, actually building on that, so when you attract an influencer, win her or him to actually post for you and share with his following, how do you actually have that rolled out? I assume you don’t just ask an influencer to push something out and hashtag at it.
Gretta:
I think that each campaign strategy needs to really be specific to your goals. So the first step to influencer marketing and any good marketing is identifying the goal of what you want to get out of that campaign. So that goal might be something like increasing brand awareness. The goal might be driving social followers. The goal might be just generating content at scale for brand or your goal might be driving sales. So once you’re able to do that, you can kind of reverse-engineer or work backward from these goals to shape the types of campaigns that you’re going to collaborate with an influencer on.
Phil:
Perfect, I would have so many more questions about that but we’ve got to cut it here. Thank you so much.
Gretta:
Thank you so much for having me.