Nathan Chan and Philipp Schoeffmann discuss how the ABCs of Instagram and leveraging Instagram Influencers can help your business grow, and more at Affiliate World Europe 2018 in Barcelona.

Interview with Nathan Chan | Founder & CEO, Foundr

By Philipp Schoeffmann

Interview Transcript

Phil:
So I’m here with Nathan Chan, Affiliate World Europe 2018 here in Barcelona. Thank you so much for coming. It’s amazing to have you.
Nathan:
Thanks so much for having me, it’s great to be here!
Phil:
You’ve had the opportunity to speak to a lot of fascinating people. Maybe you could briefly tell our audience, why, who you spoke with and what you learned from that.
Nathan:
Yeah, sure thing. So I’ve spoken with a lot of successful founders. I can name drop Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Mark Cuban, tons of multimillionaires, billionaires. And just really kind of producing great content for the entrepreneurship space. That’s what our company, Foundr Magazine does. One thing that I’ve really learned, that I learned from a really successful founder that runs a company called Xero. It’s a an accounting SaaS product. One thing that he taught me was about speed and the ability to move as fast as possible. That’s his biggest frustration. How can you move faster? And I think when you’re building your company or you’re building your startup, that’s the thing like you might be a really small team, but that’s your competitive advantage that you have against the industry leaders that are serving the space right now. That have the most market share, is the speed at which you as a small team can move at. And that’s actually something that I always kind of push into our team at Foundr because we’re going up against Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, Fast Company. These are big companies, many companies that have been around for decades. And we’ve only been around for a few years. And the competitive advantage that we have right now is speed. So I always have this sense of urgency. How can we move faster? How can we get this out faster? And I think that’s really, really important as something for someone to takeaway.
Phil:
Let’s move to what you covered onstage actually.  So mastery of Instagram and how to use it to be able to brand. So you’ve come up with a system ABC, as simple as that. Please share with us what that means and what people should do.
Nathan:
Yeah, yeah. So basically, it comes down to three steps.

The ABC’s to Insta – Starting with Instagram Influencers

The first step is you really want to make sure you work with as many Instagram influencers as possible. So in the Instagram world, on the platform, there are people that have personal brands and produce a lot of content and have a very big following. Some of them don’t have big followings but they have a great relationship with that audience. And you, as an affiliate or someone that’s selling a physical product or whatever it is you’re selling online, you need to collaborate with them and you need to work with them. And you essentially need to create partnerships with them. Where you get them to post your content. So that’s the first piece of the puzzle. Work with as many influencers as you can and get them to share your content. That’s how we’ve grown the Foundr Instagram account to over a million plus followers in the past two years. And why even today, when people say all this rubbish like, “oh the algorithm, it doesn’t work anymore” and all that stuff. That’s why our Instagram account grows 1,500 – 2,500 followers a day. We’ll be at 2 million followers later this year, right. And it all comes from working with influencers at scale and producing, then that’s the first step.
Second step is to produce content. Like, really, really great content.  I know it’s very simple, it sounds very obvious, but it’s something a lot of people don’t focus on. If you just focused on that one thing of producing the best possible content for your market on a consistent basis, then you’ll be able to win and you’ll be able to grow your account. Because if you produce great stuff for your market, people will share it with their friends.
And then the third piece of the puzzle is kind of, I guess, through utilising some of the strategies like doing giveaways and competitions. You’re using direct message to generate sales. Engaging with other brands or other bigger accounts and writing, commenting and liking. If you put it all together it works really well.
Phil:
That’s pretty cool. I’ve actually learned a lot about Instagram and influencer marketing from my conversations with Gretta Van Riel. And one thing I would like to dive into is how to actually identify the right kind of influencers. How did you do it? For your media and for your account.

Finding The Right Type of Influencers

Nathan:
Yeah, yeah. So for Foundr, it really depends. So like, I’ve got a few different companies but for Foundr, we looked for the people that we had on the front covers of our magazine. Like Gary V. and those kinds of people. But then also we found like niche accounts that have big followings and we get them to share our content. I have a rule where we only work with influencers that have a YouTube channel. And we do what’s called a share for share, shoutout for shoutout. Where we share their content and they share ours. For physical product-based businesses that I have, I have a rule where we only work with influencers that have a YouTube channel. And we only work with influencers that yeah, either have a YouTube channel or have been on TV. Why? Because they have a tremendous amount of authority and the strongest relationship I’ve seen with their audiences. So that’s how I identify them and they have to have great engagement. You can’t get a return if they don’t have great engaged account with a good relationship with their audience.

Vital: Check The Instagram Influencers Engagement Ratio

So like, look for an engagement of 2% to 5% like to follower ratio. So if someone has 50,000 followers, make sure they have at least, at minimum 1,000 likes per image. At minimum. If they have 100,000 followers, the more the better. If they get 3,000 to 5,000 likes per image then, really, really strong. And hundreds of comments, really, really strong. So they’re the things you want to look for also if they have their email address in their profile, in their bio, that means you know they’re open for business. It means you can work with them.

How to pitch to Influencers

It means you can send them emails and pitch them and say, Hey, we love what you’re doing, we’d love to send you this product, we’d love to get some content from you. And that’s where the real power is as well. The content that you get from the influencer, of them with the product or them using the product, that’s where the real gold is. Because people buy from other people that they know they can trust. And it’s like a case study, like this person is using this product and you can take an aspirational style image. If it’s somebody that someone aspires to look like or be or living a lifestyle that someone has, and you use that content to sell on your Instagram page but then also using it in you Facebook ads and your media buying.
Phil:
Of course, yeah. You repurpose that, okay.
Nathan:
It’s called user-generated content.
Phil:
So let’s stick to content for another question. So this is content that is produced by influencers but obviously you want to have your own content as well. You mentioned earlier that it is easy to create content. I personally don’t think this is true for many people out there. If you believe it’s easy, maybe you can share a couple of hacks to make it easy.
Nathan:
Yeah, sure thing. So I say it’s easy because you get other people to do it for you.
Phil:
That’s smart.
Nathan:
That’s why I say it’s easy because you work with influencers and they will do it for you.

Pro Tip: Generating User Generated Content For Your Product

But another good hack, a good hack I’ve got for you on how to get other people to do it for you, as long as you have a physical-based product is, when you’re sending out that physical-based product put a card, attach a card to when the package is going out, when it’s being picked and packed, on the condition that you’re not dropshipping, send it with a card. And with that card, what you want to say is welcome to, you know, the name of the company’s family. And you want to say, Hey we randomly choose someone every week, repost a photo of you using the product, using this hashtag. We have hundreds of images for people using the magazine, using the Foundr book.
Phil:
Nice, nice. You can actually put it in every package, don’t you?
Nathan:
Yeah. Of course, man, of course.
Phil:
This was very valuable, to me, personally and certainly, hopefully for our audience as well. Thank you so much for sharing that. Pleasure.
Nathan:
Thank you so much. Absolute pleasure.