Growth Experiments
Influencer Marketing as a paid loop
This is often called the “1/10/100” rule, and it’s no surprise that the 1 percent of highly engaged users is extremely valuable.
For YouTube, Instagram, and other content-sharing platforms, there is a “power law” curve where the 20 percent of top influencers and content creators end up with the vast majority of engagement."
From Andrew Chen's The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects.
—
I will use the upcoming editions to expand on relevant evergreen topics from Reforge Advanced Growth Strategy. This is the list:
➤ Good vs bad strategy.
➤ Influencer marketing as a Paid Loop. ✅
➤ Growth Methods & CRO.
➤ Value generator, receiver, and distributor.
➤ Building blocks for communicating growth strategy.
➤ Differentiators, neutralizers, and minimum market requirements.
➤ How useful are quant models?
—
How is this part of growth experiments?
I see influencer marketing as an engine to solve for acquisition.
In the same way performance marketeers will test their ads in upstream metrics, influencer marketing specialists will find ways to test and optimize campaigns.
Will it have the scientific rigor we expect from an AB test? No.
The elements of the scientific method still persist.
I hope you accept the fact that experimentation is much more than the statistical tool you use for your decision.
Disclaimer: Take it with an open mind.
Before we dive in, let me show this one example I love from OperaGX.
To me, this “integration campaign” encapsulates Vasco’s suggestion of how genuine the message can be.
As of today, the video reached 9.5M views — channel with 3.8M subscribers.
Am I the target audience? Absolutely not. I left video games in the past after countless hours in Skyrim.
But as a Growth Experimenter, its acquisition power is cristal clear to me.
Influencer marketing as a paid loop
A partner/supply distributed ad loop is when capital is generated and reinvested in ads distributed by supply or partners.
It's commonly referred to as influencer marketing or affiliates.
For Reforge, the influencer is considered either a supply or a partner.
What’s the difference? Market availability.
On one hand, how many crypto, beauty, fashion, food, tech Influencers exist out there? Supply is abundant.
On the other, there’s only one LeBron James partnering with Nike, only one Tim Ferris advocating Athletic Greens, only one Joe Rogan on Spotify. Partners are not replaceable.
Big audience ≠ meaningful message
How much influence or credibility do they have with their audience? Of course, the greater amount of influence the better but the fit between the topic and your primary value promise seems to be the best lever for greater results.
It seems straightforward but operationally speaking one needs to be deliberate with this analysis, especially when dealing with middle man agencies.
If you’ve made it this far, I believe you will get value from subscribing.
I dedicate 10 hours so you can read it in about 10 minutes.
Questions to the specialist
What's your definition of influencer marketing?
The essence of it is a very personalized review of your product/service by someone who has established authority within your area or industry, an audience, and influence over such.
When compared to other mediums, usually based on direct communication between brand and audience, the uniqueness is how creative and genuine that message can be.
It boils down to trust and the concept of someone referring you to a product but magnified by someone who has a lot of eyeballs directed at them.
Your audience will, in most cases, trust more a familiar face whom they follow rather than a brand who's trying to sell them something. People follow people, not companies.
Clear correlation with Cialdini's Influence principles:
authority
consensus / social proof§
similarity / liking
When you start with influencers, what problem are you ideally trying to solve?
Difficult to answer this in a vacuum, without context such as type of company, budget, market fit, and overall KPI's.
However, I see influencer marketing being able to help you with both acquisition problems and brand awareness.
I believe the better question is: "Is my company/brand fit to use Influencer Marketing? Do we have a niche?"
More often than not, before experimenting with influencer marketing as a channel, you have to do a bit of discovery and understand if there's a fit there.
My advice is: Don't use Influencer Marketing to compensate for other unsuccessful paid channels.
ROI vs brand-driven, what’s the difference?
If you're using it as a paid acquisition channel in order to drive more sales/new users, it's ROI-focused and requires a much more thorough approach since the success measure is very clear — bring more money than you're spending.
While if your focus is building brand awareness, the measure of your success is reliant on easily proven metrics, such as reach or impressions.
If you're on the ROI-driven boat, you will struggle to compete for the best influencer spots. The big budgets of brand awareness are ready to pay higher CPMs, raising the bottom price of each creator.
Growing from micro to celebrities, what’s the catch?
The ideal size of creators you work with has to be correlated with your size as a brand too, it would be somewhat ineffective for a new brand to start with medium size creators, let alone celebrities. Even for more established brands (in the growth phase), it would be quite risky to start with celebrity influencers right away.
Ideally, you start Influencer Marketing to obtain proof of concept (usually to even sell Influencer Marketing internally) and iterate as much as possible with low risk, therefore, starting with smaller creators is ideal, to gather all the learnings you can.
When you get to celebrity influencers, you already have this big backlog of learnings and know exactly your success recipe to hire someone.
How do you experiment? What metric do you optimize?
The way you experiment is by isolating variables in your campaigns and correlating them with results.
These variables can be country, size of the creator, the brief they used (if you have more than one), the topic of the video, etc. The point is to isolate them in big samples and see if there's any correlation between their variations and the final result.
This is only doable if your budget is big enough to allocate a small percentage to these experiments while having a big enough sample to draw conclusions from.
The rest of the budget is allocated to your "bread and butter" — what you know that works.
Q: Do you have any follow-up questions for Vasco?
Life as a product
What skills will I 10x?
During my new year planning, I go through a list of questions that help me set goals.
One of them is “What skills will I 10x this year?”
We all have areas where we’d benefit from improving ourselves, from curiosity or projects that would require new knowledge.
What I’ve done differently this time was asking for help. I scheduled short 1:1s with my direct manager, senior leadership members, and performance coach to ask for guidance.
Aligning business needs and personal goals
Two leadership members added confirmation and helped me prioritize expanding product management skills.
My direct manager suggested something completely out of my radar, “John, I believe emotional intelligence will support your leadership track.”
After going through an exercise mapping confidence with the coach, copywriting, and public speaking were the last additions to the shortlist.
I try my best to align personal goals with what the business needs, I believe that in the long run, this allows me to access resources and get the right exposure to learn at a much faster pace. It’s like a hack for creating my own luck.
The 70:20:10 model for efficient learning
I was first exposed to the 70:20:10 model during Brainly’s onboarding.
The idea is simple, efficient learning is project-based through practice.
Again, aligning business needs and personal goals might unlock on-the-job opportunities that maximize learning.
One of my bets starting this newsletter was to reinforce formal learning through social and experiential exposure to specific topics — such as influencer marketing experiments 😉
The shortlist of skills to 10X:
Product management
Copywriting
Emotional Intelligence (self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill)
Public speaking
Q: What’s your list of skills to 10X?
Learn from the best
A couple of years back, during the first Think Week in lovely Sopot, Poland, I wrote a personal statement. A set of guiding principles that support decision-making as I navigate life.
Here are two of them:
I am an eternal student with a curious and healthy mind.
I learn from the best minds and resources and I do not accept the suboptimal.
It is a deliberate decision to learn something. Time, the most valuable resource, will be spent pursuing a specific outcome.
If one has the option to choose, why consider the suboptimal?
Cantril ladder and learning initiatives guideline
I love to think and model life as a product.
Vision, mission, plans, goals, roadmaps, targets, initiatives.
The goal is to improve selected skills, because my target is not discrete (e.g., I want to learn how to use window functions in big query), I use the concept of the Cantril Ladder — a similar method I use for the Wheel of Life.
It’s not like I know nothing about copywriting, however, on a scale from zero to ten, I believe I am 6.
Now, what does it take to get to 7? What does 10 even mean? How would I feel if I were a 10?
Those questions help me get specific and measure backward, so I’m always living the gain.
For the initiatives, my guideline for defining how to learn is as simple as:
Are you able to participate in a project and learn it by practicing it?
Do you have access to a coach or mentor to give you the right shortcuts?
What is the best possible resource to learn this from? Got recommendations?
Is there a book to read from? Remember, the best answer to old questions are in old books that withstood the test of time.
Afterthought — On leadership and backlogged ideas
From my experience, leadership members tend to be full of new initiatives but are often suppressed by the reality of targets to deliver.
My hypothesis is that most ideas end up in the backlog because delegating is as challenging as finding the right leader to trust with labor and capital leverage.
I learned that it's empathetic (and strategic) to position oneself as the aspiring soldier to champion a leaders' initiative instead of pushing yet another agenda.
There’s little to no buy-in struggle if one is executing on leadership dreams.
Handpicked from other brilliant minds
The battle against roadmaps
This is why roadmap-building is so hard. It’s like planning a four-day road trip in Europe where the Marketing team wants to go to a big conference in Paris, the Sales team wants to visit an important customer in Prague, and the engineering team wants to stop over in Munich to overhaul the engine of the car.
This week our experimentation team engaged in this epic discussion of how good or bad roadmaps are.
It all started with “We are asked to deliver our experimentation strategy, what exactly does that mean? A roadmap of tests?”
We still don’t have the right answer. But Itamar Gilad’s material helped ignite the fire.
Elena Verna talks about Growth
iTech Media’s CEO, Harley Kisberg, sent me this epic podcast with Elena Verna.
The #1 takeaway: “The main tool of any growth team is #experimentation.” 🎯
If you want my notes, check here. A lot of positive feedback on this one 🚀
How Netflix optimizes snippets
I can’t Twitter. However, I understand there are hidden gems in that network.
Shout out to Kacper Staniul who brings to my attention some gold nuggets.
Meta-analysis — January 2022
10 days traveling;
32 hours reading or listening to audiobooks — testing going through 4 books at the same time;
12 hours spent studying financial market;
10 Hours meditating — will write about this new superpower soon;
22 hours producing content;
28 hours networking.
Life becomes content
Epic meetup in London with Lorenzo, David, and Andrea.
Great laughs, smart questions, arguments on wealth creation.
It's fascinating to be around like-minded people. Network works.
Life is good.
Was it worth your time reading? If so, here’s my last CTA.