At Affiliate World Europe, Paul Schoeffmann picked the brains of Paul Kalka from Onnit regarding Instagram influencer marketing and affiliate marketing. Watch his full AWE19 presentation here.

This post, “Paul Kalka On Instagram Influencer Marketing On Instagram” first appeared on the AWC Facebook Page.

AWeurope Interview with Paul Kalka, Influencer & Affiliate Marketing Manager of Onnit Labs

Instagram Influencer Marketing and Affiliate Marketing

Phil:
🎙️ Affiliate World, what’s up? We’re here in 2019, Barcelona. I’m here with Paul Kalka of Onnit. We’re speaking Instagram influencer marketing.

What did you just share onstage? Give us the main points, please.

Paul:
Yeah, sure, so we talked about an influencer that I onboarded to our affiliate program. So instead of doing a one-time, typical Instagram influencer marketing deal, by spending maybe $3,000 or $5,000 and getting a couple of sales, I introduced him to the performance marketing world, which included Instagram influencer marketing. He was able to go from zero affiliate experience to crushing our affiliate program and making almost $100,000 in just under three months.
Phil:
🎙️ That’s amazing. How did you do that? How did you approach that? So I assume if you’re new to affiliate marketing, I’d find it a little hard to get started because it has been easy back in the day but it’s getting more and more complex. There’s so many things you can do. So how did you approach that? How did you make that happen?
Paul:
Sure, yeah. For me, I look for affiliates who obviously tie in well with the brand and I really work my affiliates to figure out what it is that their audience wants. So luckily for me, like this guy had 400,000 on Instagram when we first started working together and it helps a lot, but not knowing what to promote it did take some time for him to get the hang of Instagram influencer marketing. He didn’t get his first sale until four weeks after promoting. So testing offers is obviously big, testing a straight sale versus a trial offer, testing different creatives, what really worked for him was getting super funny and super relevant to his audience. So keeping it in line with his typical brand message but also crossing over with how Onnit typically talks about our brand as well, which was just a match made in heaven.

Instagram Influencer Marketing: Tips For Testing

Phil:
🎙️ Okay, cool. So how do you make that match made in heaven possible?
Paul:
A lot of testing works well. We’re focused on Instagram influencer marketing for this case study, so testing an in-feed post versus a story post, I think a lot of our affiliates are on Instagram and it’s a great channel and I always tell them that the best way to make sales on Instagram is through swipe ups. So figuring out what kind of content within swipe ups and figuring out the frequency to talk to your audience works really well if you’re talking organic. And then figuring out once you do have an offer that works well organically, figuring out a good targeting and ad strategy to really bump that post up and spread the message as much as possible.
Phil:
🎙️ I’ve a lot of questions about that. So we do a lot of Facebook and Instagram paid ads. We don’t do a lot of organic stuff. How do you test? What’s your process here?
Paul:
I think the bigger you are, the less love Instagram gives you with their organic algorithm, obviously. So our method of testing is really two-fold. First off, starting with a link in your bio is the classic Instagram influencer marketing way. An in feed post like “hey, go check out the link in my bio”, click or save or whatever the offer might be and figuring out a way to attract attention and get that “thumb-stopping power” as we always used to say in the agency that I used to work for.

A creative has to be thumb-stopping. It has to be eyeball catching because you only have a second or two to really stop someone in their tracks and really pay attention to what you’re saying on the platform, and then figuring out what is engaging, what content organically is getting more views, is getting more swipe-ups than you’re typically seeing and from there, boosting that post, advertising it to your existing audience and then expanding off of those.

Instagram Influencer Marketing: Working With Influencers Of All Sizes

Phil:
🎙️ So you do actually start off with organic posts, right?
Paul:
With a lot of the affiliates that I’ve worked for, yes.
Phil:
🎙️ Huh, interesting. Okay, because I’m an ads nerd. So everything I started out with is ads. So I test products, I test creatives, everything started with ads. I think it’s a nice strategy if you have the audience already, you start off organic and see how that feels, how that connects with your audience. If that makes a lot of sense.
Paul:
Yeah, and a lot of my affiliates don’t have 400,000 followers on Instagram. A lot of them who do Instagram influencer marketing are smaller, some of them don’t even have the swipe-up functionality but we’re still able to make sales. Just by giving that proper message, giving that proper timing, talking about the offer that resonates with their audience. At Onnit we have like 90-something SKUs, so you can talk about so many different things if you’re trying to promote the brand, by really kind of focusing on one thing that matters to you and talking about that and giving it the right frequency seems to help for someone who’s not using paid ads.

Instagram Influencer Marketing: Advice For Creatives

Phil:
🎙️ Okay, so let’s speak about creatives for Instagram influencer marketing. Obviously it’s different depending on who your audience is, but do you have some general tips for creatives if you want to be successful on Instagram?
Paul:
Yeah, I do. So I like to provide creatives for our affiliates but I find that when they take the initiative to build their own creatives, and using the same theme and style they’re using to talk to their audience on a more organic approach as well, seems to work really well.

In the case study that I used, for example, they used a creative that was very relevant to the topic that they typically talk about on their Instagram feed page, but also a movie married with that topic, which was Aladdin at the time, so there was a photoshopped version of the genie from Aladdin and some very vulgar language seemed to work really well. So kind of using the meme approach, for lack of a better term, worked really well in this case.

The Future Of Instagram Influencer Marketing

Phil:
🎙️ Alright, cool. What do you see for the future? So, where is the entire influencer world moving towards?
Paul:
Yeah, so traceability and accountability, I’d say. For us, we love working with our influencers but sometimes it’s hard to know what their value is. So holding everyone accountable is really going to be a theme for us here in 2019 and that’s going to be through dedicated landing pages for influencers, a more robust marketing calendar for them whether it’s talking about a new product we have or a particular sale or initiative that we might have and figuring out what the value of each of those influencers are. Whether it is direct sales, whether it is just brand recognition, we get a lot of people coming in to our brand because they’re particular influencers but it’s so hard to track.

We run through Instagram influencer marketing, we run through AdWords, we run through Facebook, we run through our own channels. It’s just an accountability problem, so figuring out the best ways to tackle that problem is going to be key going forward.

Phil:
🎙️ Well, I wish you best of luck for that challenge. Definitely lots of success in the world of Instagram influencer marketing and it was great having you here. Thank you so much.
Paul:
Thank you.