Tips for Bootstrapping your agency to $10M rev

Quotes

• “The big things that brands are looking for are influencers who will speak about a certain niche and then there is some flexibility around that niche. For example, if you are a plant influencer, all of your audience care about plants, they care about what to buy, what shade, soil nutrients, and the type of pots to have so if a brand sees that and that is their target audience, you are likely to get a contract with them as opposed to someone who is more general lifestyle content.” -Mae“We looked at the subject of each influencer we work with on each platform. Say, you live in San Francisco and your audience lives in one of the states of US that really helps a brand come narrow in on who they want to with.” -Mae“Who makes up your audience is really important and also how engaged are they? You can have an influencer who has 50,000 followers and they are getting 2,000 likes per post. Another has 200,000 followers and they are getting 500 likes per post, we are always going to go with the influencer who has 50,000 followers.” -Mae“So content topic, geography, the size of your following, the engagement of your following those seems to be the 4 bigcriteria.” -Ben“There are very few benchmarks in the industry currently and things are evolving very quickly. For instance, we do quite a bit of work on Tik-Tok, we worked with an influencer for $25 per post, we come back a few weeks later, they’ve talked to a few more people and they are like, oh I am now at $3,000. So there is usually a negotiation and it’s important for a brand to have their set benchmarks of what the are willing to pay because performance can vary greatly as well.” -Mae“It’s the same thing with podcast advertising. I have this conversation at least once a week about how podcast advertising works where I think most people anchor on how display media is sold. It is a $25 to $50 cpm but a download is not actually an impression, a listen is not actuallya listener, and all these metrics are different so.” -Mae “One thing we do a lot of and brands really appreciate and I think actually leads to higher performance, we think of what an influencer would take for any old brand and then we say, ‘okay if we can decrease that by 10%, we’ll get the influencers on board and we are just really, really excited to work with that company and see who is willing to negotiate and flex a little bit.” -Mae“We are talking about bad brand tax. If you are a company that is not so cool and that influencer knows and they talk about it that they are going to catch some flak on their channel, it doesn’t totally go with their general aesthetic, like if it will come off as super canned and really inauthentic. I use that as sortof a baseline.” -Mae“If you are on Instagram and you are a micro influencer, it could be anywhere from $100 to $100,000 depending on the brand, the product they are getting, and the ask. We had a brand who wanted the influencers to drive to Red Rocks in the Southwest and take photos there, so that’s gas money, a time of our day, so that’s going to be $5,000 as a person as opposed to just drinking a soda for instance, and they can be happy at $150.” -Mae“I think the measuring stick of influencers always gets down to the audience size. Obviously engagement is a big part of that and I think that most people when they think about measuring, they’re making sure that the topic is relevant, and thinking about geography but probably not as much as they shouldbut what they are really looking is the number of followers, in podcast it’s the number of downloads, my guess in YouTube is probably the subsrcibers and in Tik-Tok, I don’t know what metrics the kids are paying attention to.” -Mae“We worked with people who has a small as a 1,000 followers. But I would say that once you are in the 5,000 mark we can get you some pretty interesting brands. The industry standard I think is 10,000 because that’s when you have a swipe up link on Instagram and you could really start to track traffic but there are interesting people at 7K to 8K with audiences that buy but they just can’re really swipe up yet.” -Mae“Like with any content business, you have to have a tone, a perspective, we are just calling it ad value but there has to be a reason why someone should want to follow you first and foremost. What the content is, what your product really matters.” -Ben