Last week, I spent most of my time meeting marketers and founders of agencies in Madrid at South Summit, one of the biggest events in the start up space in southern Europe, and there is where I met our next blog guest.
If a brand has refused to work with you again, you will find some of the reasons for it in this blog post, where our guest will go othrough her top 3 tips for influencers who want to continue working with a brand throughout time.
She runs one of Spain's top micro influencer agencies, and after thousands of successful collaborations, she has seen why some brands never work again with a particular profile, so keep reading to learn more about Jesica Alcalde's experiences running Fuel Your Brands!
A: Who are you and what do you do for a living?
J: Hi Gigapay community! I am Jesica Alcalde and I am currently CEO and Co-Founder of FuelYourBrands, a Spanish platform that connects brands with micro-influencers, automating the entire process from start to finish. We are already operating in Spain, Mexico, Colombia and we are about to open Chile.
A: What were you doing before starting Fuel Your Brands and what led you to found Fuel Your Brands?
J: Before starting my business, I spent 8 years leading marketing departments for other brands. During these years, I discovered how powerful and efficient it was to work with micro-influencers to boost brands, with less budget I could reach more people than with larger profiles. But I also discovered that it was a tedious, expensive and not very automated process, since managing a collaboration takes approximately 10 hours of work, which led me to think about how I could solve this problem.
In March 2020, during the beginning of the pandemic, I was fired from the company where I worked and it became clear to me that it was time to develop FuelYourBrands. So I created the tool that I would have liked to have as CMO, reducing the management time per collaboration from 10h to 10min.
A: What makes Fuel your brands different from your competitors? How many creators have you onboarded?
J: First of all, at FuelYourBrands we are specialised in micro-influencers, creators who have from 3,000 to 80,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. We have a community that registers on our platform consciously and voluntarily (we are not a cold DDBB). This allows us to access the creator's statistics thanks to an APIs, and consequently, we can audit if the profile is of good quality, if it has purchased followers, etc. We only allow access to micro-influencers who have +4% ER.
On the other hand, we have reversed the process. When a brand creates a campaign on the platform, it first segments the type of profile it would like to work with and only profiles from our community that match those requirements can sign up for the campaign. So the influencer goes to the brand, which allows a greater match. Finally, the brand selects its favourite profiles to start the collaboration. By reversing the process, our platform is very reactive and allows you to launch a campaign today to start working with interested creators today too, being able to collaborate from 10 to 500 micro-influencers, both nationally and locally.
Thanks to automation, we can show our clients a real-time results report, direct chat with influencers, sociodemographic data, etc.
We currently have a community of +15,000 microinfluencers located in Spain, Mexico and Colombia. And we continue to grow very fast every day!
A: What is the biggest mistake influencers make when working with brands?
J: The biggest mistakes in general is usually the lack of flexibility. For brands, it is very important to work with creators who are flexible and open to possible changes to the content if it is not exactly what the brand was looking for. Also the accessibility, usually the communication is not as smooth as in any other job.
A: Can you name a few creators or give us examples of a perfectly executed campaign by a creator? What made that creator stand out from the other influencers who worked with him/her on that campaign?
J: I can't name one in particular because I don't have permission, but clearly the influencers who stand out the most are the ones who get involved much more than what is asked of them. In other words, if a brand hires 1 reel and the influencer publishes 3 extra stories, they are much better received by the brands and are more likely to collaborate with them again.
Another good practice is to answer to your community the questions they get about the product or service that is being promoted. Because that's what it's all about, sharing.
A: What are the top 3 things a brand looks for in a creator to select them for a paid collaboration?
J: First, review that the creator has a good reputation. It is important to know, not only the present of the creator, but also the past.
Second, that the creator publishes 100% in accordance with the brand's principles, because your brand is being represented by a person.
And third, metrics and more metrics. It is very important to analyse the loyalty of your followers, measure your reach and check if your audience is located in the countries/cities that interest the brand.
A: Can you show us a screenshot of how you measure the performance of a campaign so we can learn how you compare the work of different creators for the same campaign?
J: Of course! I can share with you a report on the results of a campaign for a brand of glasses, which with only 27 micro-influencers, it achieved these impressive results through our platform:
Got over 6M impressions, +14k shares, +900k likes... The best? On a budget of less than $3,000, and here are the top performers:
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(We have removed their real names due to GDPR)
A: What is the worst problem you face when working with influencers and why is it a problem?
J: As I mentioned earlier, the biggest problem is the lack of fluidity.
It is necessary to have platforms or experts to help brands automate the process. First, because they save resources and second, because they ensure that your budget is well spent. Since specialists have tools and market analysis that help us make good decisions and recommend the most optimal strategy for brands.
A: Many brands are confused between a branding campaign and a sales boosting campaign. When they work with creators to create brand awareness they get disappointed because their sales didn't go up, can you explain the different strategies (brand awareness VS sales boosting) and which type of creators (size, E.R.) should be used for each type of campaign?
J: I always say that the job of influencer marketing is to bring the client to the doorstep of your business, then how you treat them once inside (customer service, price/quality of your product vs competitors, usability of your e-commerce, etc.), it does not depend on the influencer, it depends exclusively on the brand.
On the other hand, we start from the basis that an influencer marketing campaign usually works at the top of the funnel. It serves to work on notoriety, brand recognition, trust and reputation. Can sales come after that? Yes, they can, I have seen it in many campaigns, but you have to be constant. You cannot pretend that through a one-off collaboration with a single creator your stock will run out. A very intensive and hands on strategy is necessary to achieve sales through creators.
And this works like this in any field of digital marketing, we must not forget that influencer marketing is an additional layer of that strategy. For example, if tomorrow you decide to launch an ad in Meta or Google Ads, and the following week you close it, it will be giving you results only while it is active, when it ends, the results will stop coming in. Well, influencer marketing would be the same.
However, the size of the influencer and ER also affects the results. Micro-influencers are more focused on conversion, since even though they have fewer followers, their recommendation is stronger because they are perceived as friends. So collaborating with a large number of them is very interesting.
A: Anything else you'd like to add?
J: Finally, I would like to insist that brands have to rely on professionals from the sector to help them execute their strategy correctly.
With the right influencer and the right strategy, you can get infinite benefits in your business.
Thank you very much for reading and see you soon!
