The Influencer Marketing Masterclass

Hey friend,

Influencer marketing is the holy grail.

I’ve gotten to do placements with people like Reid Hoffman, Professor Galloway, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and even a UFC fighter. Chances are you’ve skipped through one of my ads in a podcast before… or maybe you bought!

My goal is to give you the most complete guide to influencer marketing that I can. I will walk you through how you can go from $0 to deploying your first $1,000,000.

Here’s everything you’re going to learn.

🤔 How to know if influencer marketing is right for you
🔎 How to find the right influencers
📻 Different types of placements
💸 How to deploy your budget
🧲 How to do outreach right
📚 How to book the placement
🏆 Best practices
🚩 Red flags

Let’s get into it.

Adam

P.S. If you want to reach customers organically through community ads learn more here.

Disclaimers

If you aren’t careful, influencer ads are a quick way to lose a ton of money. I only advice marketing experts who have figured out other paid channels first to do it.

🤔 How to know if influencer marketing is right for you

You don’t have a lot of time and these are the most time intensive relationships.

If you don’t have a good funnel, clear messaging, and a good product, then wait. You’re better off figuring out how to run paid ads then do 1 off influencer giveaways.

When starting you will lose money on about 80% of placements. 10% you will get a close to break even return. The last 10% will be straight magic. If you don’t have a big enough budget to do the proper testing, you won’t find that last magical 10%.

You also need the right product. Physical tangible products with a high price point or subscription are great. You can justify the CPA and it has mass appeal. I was using influencer marketing for a digital product (premium subscription).

The ads aren’t as good because it’s harder if they can’t hold your product, but they still work. If you’re doing a newsletter, a product with a small margin, or something super niche, you will have a harder time. I would consider doing a referral program in those instances.

If you have an effective funnel that you’re ready to expand and you have a good product for it, then it might be time to try influencers.

🔎 How to find the right influencers

Developing an influencer strategy has many parallels with a SEO strategy.

There are key topics that you want to hit, then there are second level removed topics and third level topics around your subject.

Direct Topic

Always start with the low hanging fruit. You intuitively know the influencers in your space. They are the thought leaders and tastemakers.

Always start there, there is no need to get too creative right off the bat.

Who is popular and in your price range?

Adjacent interests

Adjacent interests have the biggest ROI. After you’ve gone through your direct topic influencers, now you can move into adjacent interests.

If your target market is yoga teachers an adjacent interest could be van life. So marketing on a page about van life can be a great way to reach yoga teachers. My huge unlock was finding a YouTube channel that was “business essays”. Something an entrepreneur would be interested in, but wasn’t directly entrepreneur advice.

Think of the things your customer enjoys when they’re not engaging in your industry. This is the goldmine.

Random Topics

Once you have spent a lot, you will have to go into the random topics bucket. People who have an engaged audience but are not talking about anything related to what you’re doing.

There is a long path to get here. Your product should also have mass appeal if you’re going to enter into this spend category.

The key here is not what they are talking about, but audience location and engagement levels. Also ask yourself, is this something your customer would watch. If it isn’t, then skip it.

📻 Different types of placements

Podcast placements

You know what this is, you’ve skipped through the first five minutes of a Tim Ferriss podcast before.

Podcast CPMs can go in-between $40 to $100+.

They are also the hardest placement to track.

Some services claim to have a “pixel” and maybe in the last years this has developed but basically you have to rely on them going through the custom landing page or a HDYHAU survey.

Placements will typically be 1 - 2 minutes.

From my experience, even with a golden audience, a $100 CPM is hard to be profitable. A podcast read needs a good story, value proposition, and clear CTA. More on this later.

Another placement type is a native post to an influencers socials.

The key here is to not value the placement based on followers, but on impressions. If someone has a big following but low engagement, that’s all that matters.

I typically would take the last 20 posts and create calculate the average impressions. On your ad, it’s safe to expect a 50% drop-off from the average impressions. The reason being people engage less with ads.

So if an influencer has 100,000 followers and is getting an average of 10,000 views on videos, I would value that placement around $100 to $400 depending on the vertical. I’ve seen influencers pricing a social post at $2,500 at those types of numbers, avoid these.

If they let you reuse the creative for paid ads (which you should always ask for) then you could make your money back on a PPC, but I would almost never do that placement. You can lose your shirt very quickly.

Twitter Influencers

Not as common but you can run placements with influencers on Twitter.

I would think of it the same as other social platforms, but there is something you can do on Twitter to get some extra juice.

The best thing to do is you can whitelist their account and run a paid post through them and target their audience/LALs of their audiences.

That’s how you really get your bang for your buck. If they don’t want to do that a referral deal also works.

YouTube Placements

I didn’t include YouTube in the social placement bucket because YouTube is in a different league.

I don’t recommend using YouTube placements until you’re running YouTube ads. While they have higher CPMs, lower CTRs, the CVR is actually good. You can get some traffic through YouTube and set up really good retargeting.

With YouTube placements you’ll be spending $2,500+ for a placement. So if you’re not willing to invest $100,000 this isn’t the route for you. We used to drop $16,000 happily for one video, and these are for niche channels with 1m subs. The top tier Mr. Beast levels are likely inaccessible for most brands ($1m+).

I talked with someone who ran the influencer strategy for a company you know. They worked with Mr. Beast and he gave me a surprising insight. He said the actual ads from him were not profitable, but the return from working with him came from every other YouTuber hitting them up wanting to do ads for cheap because they wanted to promote the same brand Mr. Beast did. That’s wild.

If you can unlock YouTube placements they are my favorite form of influencer ads. You can test audiences by targeting them with YouTube PPC before even running a paid ad with them. It’s the same with Twitter Ads.

That is how you test an audience before getting into a big deal with them. If you notice a higher CTR or CVR then other audiences, move forward with trying to work with them.

💸 How to deploy your budget

Let’s say you have $1,000,000 to spend and haven’t spent $1 yet.

($1M is just a number, you can adjust this to whatever your reality is.)

Your goal is to get a core group of influencers you use again and again.

I would break that budget into different phases.

Discovery $0 to $100,000
Optimization $100,000 to $350,000
Scale $350,000 to $1,000,000

Phase One: Discovery phase

Your first portion of the budget will be spent 100% on tests.

You don’t know up vs. down at this point. We are solely guided by intuition. You want to test channels and influencer types.

I would run (in order of importance):

3 - 5 YouTube placements — $30,000
4 - 5 Podcasts — $20,000
3 - 5 Newsletters — $10,000
5 - 10 Social (TikTok, IG) — $2,500

You will have some stand out performance. Then use remaining budget to double down on promising areas and pull away from poor performing ones (maybe Newsletters work but TikTok doesn’t).

Use the CPA you have on other channels as your guiding light.

Now put your placements in three buckets.

Magic (Highly profitable)
Acceptable (Acceptable CPA)
Garbage can (< breakeven)

A magic placement can be 3 - 5X cheaper then what you’re seeing on PPC channels. It’s obvious when you find one. If you did all your homework, you should get 1 to 2 here and start to see which channels are interesting to you. For me it was YouTube placements.

An acceptable one is within your given CPA range. You could be deploying that capital on Facebook at equal efficiency but it’s good to have a couple of these running so you’re deploying capital efficiently.

The garbage can placements are 0 conversion to unprofitable. Many of your placements will go into this bucket.

Phase Two: Optimization Phase

Now you should be spending roughly 30% of your budget on magic placements, 20% on average and 50% on testing.

For the magic placements, get booked out into the future. You can get a cheaper deal by booking more, work out a deal with them. These will start to make up for your losses.

Continue with some of the average placements. But why Adam? Well for testing. Use these placements to tinker with your offer/creative to see if it improves performance. Once you upgrade your messaging / style / landing page here you can then apply it to the rest of your funnel.

Don’t mess with the magic placements for testing, just let them do their thing. When you start to see diminishing returns, take what you learned from the other optimizations then apply them here.

Whatever channels you’re seeing success in, start to invest more in them. If YouTube placements are your thing, index more of your tests into them. Find similar channels.

For example, we found a YouTube channel that went gangbusters, then we found a similar channel in the same space and guess what? It also went gangbusters. Even just looking through YouTube’s recommendations can give you your next perfect placement.

At this point, you’re starting to see the magic in influencer marketing.

Phase Three: Scale

Your goal is to get 80% of your placements to magical ones and 20% to testing.

The acceptable CPA bucket is where you lose your time. If you can get the same CPA with PPC ads, then why would you use an influencer? It’s much more work. So it’s time to dial down the average placements.

Try to expand magical as much as possible then keep testing with new influencers. At some point your magical ads will start to lose their magic, and you have better been testing to find your new influencer or you’ll be caught with your pants down.

At this phase, all of the .1X return losses will be made up for with the rest of your budget deploying.

You should be able to say confidently “My best placements are done on X channel with Y type of creator with Z offer.” Now scale it to the moon baby.

🧲 How to do outreach right

Most people won’t get back to you.

The cooler your brand, the better you will do. You have to write the perfect cold email.

Hit them all at once, rinse, and repeat

I would get their email from their YouTube channels, connect and message them them on LinkedIn, DM them on Twitter all in one go.

I like to do the 3 - 4 channels at once so it’s harder to ignore. If you show you care and are really excited for the collab you are going to 2-3X your response rate (I use the same strategy with hiring.)

If they’re big they have a system for inbound requests or some sort of manager. All of your communication will be done through this person and you may never interface with the actual influencer. This is a bit disappointing if you are a genuine fan but remember your goal is to work with them not become their best friend.

To stand out you have to prove you’re a paying customer and you have a solid brand that improves their image (hence the email messaging above).

If they’re solo, they are dealing with a LOT of random message. 90% of influencers in-bound requests are people asking for things for free.

So putting in, we want to give you $ for a collab is important and puts you above 9/10 requests.

If they don’t respond I like to do a reminder to re-message that same thread every now and again with follow up message like this:

“Hey I know you’re super busy but I’m still interested in paying for a collab if you have any open slots :)”

In general people send walls of text as cold outreach, that never works (I ain’t reading all that). The goal is to show that you’re willing to pay, you are a quality company, and you’re easy to work with.

Build a system

At some point, random outreach will become unmanageable.

You should make a sheet with it or use your favorite CRM.

Treat it like any sales funnel. Where are they at in the funnel, last outreach, contacts, goals, etc. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated just 4 columns in a Google sheet. The key is to stay consistent and do enough outreach. It is a game of numbers. If you have a team, do it yourself initially then outsource the outreach to a team member and have them follow your system.

📚 How to book the placement

Okay so they said yes. How do you not come across as a noob.

If they’re pros, they will have contracts. If not, you want one.

There are a lot of contracts online of boilerplate contracts. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t get paid like one so I won’t spend the time here making it now. Here are the mechanisms at your disposal that I recommend when you get to this stage.

The ability for a “make good” if the read doesn’t perform. Guaranteed views, so if you are paying for an expected 100,000 views but only get 50,000, they will do another placement to reach that level. I call them eCPM (expected CPM).

Of course try to get the rights to the creative they make about your brand here. Get the right to use their image on your landing pages, etc. Not every influencer is down for this and some will die on this hill.

Up to you how you want to do payments. Half now and half after if you feel sketch. Get things like the length, when and how many placements, if they will have your link in the bio, dates it’s expected by. Think through every detail and anything you want you can put in. If it isn’t in writing it isn’t legit. However, to be fair, I only do this level with the big influencers where we’re spending over +$1,000 on.

For an Instagram influencer post for $250, you don’t need to send them to law school for a single feed post. But those scenarios I would be more careful about the cash and when to pay. Sometimes people don’t come through with the placements and there is little retaliation available from the advertisers side.

How to negotiate placements

Everyone has a “premium” audience and everyone deserves a +$100 CPM.

If you believe this, don’t deploy a single $1. You’re going to lose it all.

Unless you have a super-niche and a very high-ticket product, you will lose money on that placement every time. Every time.

If they give you a number you know you can’t do, just tell them let’s circle back in the future. Avoid negotiating from a place of FOMO. It’s hard because you have spent so much time developing that relationship but going through with a bad deal will feel much worse.

🏆 Best practices

Create custom landing pages for each influencer

Having a custom landing page helps with attribution and controlling the offer you’re running. Put the influencers face and name on it at the top of the fold.

They don’t need to take a custom photo for you with the product (it’s better if they do). I would literally just cut them out in photoshop, add a little of our branding behind them and even change the body text to mention them.

Add a quote from the reading about us after you hear it so the messaging pulls into your landing page.

Example: “Unlock this special offer thanks to Tim.” Add some customization to the body copy connecting it to Tim.

Small influencers are usually not worth it

Think of it like a typical ad, the numbers are not super far off.

Let’s walk through an imaginary scenario. Let’s imagine they get 1,000 impressions that you pay $50 for ($50 CPM). You get a 5% CTR. That is 50 clicks. If you have a 2% CVR that would equal 1 sale. With all the back and forth was it worth it?

If you have really high ticket stuff, this can be some good cash in the bank.

If you need a bigger volume, you have to realize that each influencer takes hours to setup from outbound to setting up landing pages, testing links, sending the money, tracking results.

If it results in $50 in sales you also have to value of your time in this equation so beware of spinning your wheels here.

Run cost per acquisition deals with smaller influencers

If you do want to work with 100s of small influencers and turn it into a strategy, it can be worth your time.

Create a referral program and do CPA deals. Your product should have a high-enough price point to make it enticing for them. Try to remove yourself from the process as much as you can.

Warning, communication and reporting will be a nightmare.

If someone has never run an ad before, try to be their first

There are a lot of up and coming influencers who have not ‘monetized’ their audience yet. We were lucky to be the first advertisers for many people like Packy from Not Boring.

When you’re an influencers first product, you will get outsized returns.

Their audience wants to support them somehow, and since they aren’t numb to hearing them talk about Athletic Greens yet, you’re in a great place.

Shooting a message like “Hey I love your show, I notice you don’t advertise. We would love to sponsor your show. When you’re ready to start advertising we would love to be your first placement!”

Then just follow up as time goes on to show that you care, because you do.

Use influencers to get creative for paid ads

This works well. I’ve done placements purely because I knew the ad creative that person created would be good even if the placement was at a loss.

Make sure the use of the creative is part of the deal.

TikTokers are best. They know how to grab attention and make UGC feeling content. YouTube placements don’t work well as ads since they’re usually folded into their video with transitions. You can clip out parts of them if they’re good and create a bigger piece of ad creative.

Should I pay for tools?

You can use tools for discovering influencers. They can be as cheap as $19 a month and as expensive as $50,000 a year. Unless you have a huge micro-influencer program, I highly recommend avoiding expensive tools like this.

Most of your search should be organic until you’ve hit a point where you can’t find people anymore.

This won’t happen for a long-time. I think most of the influencer finding platforms are not worth it for the first 6 months. They seem like a magic bullet but you will always have the same problems. Maybe with AI there are some better tools coming out but I haven’t seen anything exciting in the space yet.

Create a special offer

There has to be a reason someone would go to /tim vs. just going to the main website. Tim listeners get X% off. It can be the same as Steve’s listeners deal, but that is important.

I would auto-apply that influencers coupon to their cart on the redirect and have them also say the promo code in the read so if they go into your funnel not through the influencers page you can have better attribution.

On redirects to checkout I also add UTMs connecting to them to make attribution even clearer.

Example:

utm_source=influencers&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=tim

If you’re a big brand, there is a right and wrong way to use influencers

It’s obvious when a campaign feels top down vs. bottom up.

The purpose of influencer marketing is not to take your top down brand message and having it change the influencer.

Instead, it’s about the influencer interpreting your brand.

For example, we did podcast placements with Pomp. Pomp has this tweet pinned to the top of his profile:

My rules of business: Build shit people want, never give up, avoid assholes, question assumptions, learn new ideas & always reward ambition

— Pomp (@APompliano)

I had him start off the read by saying that quote, then go into how this connected to our product. This makes it not seem like an ad. The goal isn’t to have robots repeating your message but allowing the influencers to express things in their own style.

🚩 Red flags

Never do a package deal with an influencer out the gate

We did a $20,000 deal with a podcast you probably listen to.

They would only work with us if we signed on to four episodes. The audience seemed perfect, the hosts had a lot of credibility so we went for it.

It turned into one of the biggest 💩 returns we’ve ever had (.05 ROI).

If the first ad is bad, the rest will be bad. The audience never gets 10x better after the second episode. Always do 1 test episode before working out a package deal with someone.

Not every influencer is okay with this. In those instances I recommend to politely pass. It’s not worth it.

Many influencers have dead audiences

Maybe they went viral a year or more ago. I always try to discover when they got most of their growth and from what.

If 50% of their audience came in from a video that went viral a year ago and isn’t relevant to what they post today (or your product) then move on.

I would actually ignore the total number of followers they have and just look at current engagement.

A sponsored post typically gets 50% of their normal engagement.

Should I use an agency?

One of my mentors had the philosophy that you should hire an agency, learn the playbook, then do it in-house.

I largely agree with this, especially in regards to things you might have no in-house expertise in. However, I would be careful when doing this with influencer marketing and here’s why.

They will overreport results, it’s industry standard to apply a blanket 4X to your performance because something like a podcast has such difficult attribution. They are transparent about this, but something about that never sat right with me.

They have their own network and they do all of the interface with clients so it’s hard to build your network. However, influencer marketing can be a full-time job. So If you want to just work with an agency to save you time, there is nothing wrong with that.

Be a hawk on watching the actual performance and do your best to build out your network. So if you part ways with the agency you can continue the relationships.

Beware of working with people you’re a fan of

We did a placement with someone I was a fan of. It was a high CPM (over $100). My rational brain didn’t think it would work, but I loved them and wanted to work with them.

Long story short, it didn’t work. It was one of the worst we’ve done. When someone is super famous they have less pull on the outer rings of their audiences. I might watch someone’s video because I know of them, but I’m not a fan and I’m not going to buy anything they’re selling.

Celebrities and influencers are not the same.

The bigger someone is the more of their audience is like that. People that aren’t stop on the street famous don’t have this happening as much. Unless it makes sense to work with a celebrity, beware.

That’s a wrap

If you made it this far, you’re going places.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams was 46,333 words.

This was over 4,400 words and I told myself I had to stop writing or I would have written a book.

Keep me updated on your progress, now get out there and crush it.

Onwards and upwards,