Episode Summary
What is influencer marketing all about? How can you build quality relationships with influencers? And is B2B influencer marketing the same as B2C? If you’ve asked yourself any of these questions before, prepare yourself to finally get some of those answers from Jay Desai.
Jay is the Founder of Swpely, a tool for saving, curating, and sharing modern content on the internet. He decided to build Swpely as a new, better solution that makes it easier to save the best ideas online as well as make ideas more actionable. Jay has a rich background in B2B marketing, content, growth, and influencer marketing.
According to Jay, to be an influencer, you don’t need to have a million followers. You just need to have an influence over your existing followers. On the other hand, brands should aim to collaborate with influencers that are, above all, great content creators and that know how to communicate effectively. If you want to learn more about how to implement successful influencer collaborations, tune in to this episode of the Content Logistics podcast.
Guest Profile
- Name: Jay Desai
- What he does: Jay is the Founder of Swpely, a tool for saving and sharing modern content (websites, images, videos, podcasts, tweets, LinkedIn posts).
- Company: Swpely
- Noteworthy: Before founding his first company at the beginning of 2021, Jay was mostly in B2B marketing. His background is in growth and content, but he's open to trying new things and exploring new fields.
Key Insights
- Influencer marketing is ultimately about building relationships. The stronger your influencer connections are, the better your marketing campaign results will be. It all boils down to equal or close to equal value exchange. Jay sees influencer marketing as an opportunity to build relationships and understand your target audience, especially for early-stage companies. "You want to make it more about building relationships than anything else. And so that's why I say you can run it at any stage of the business because, at every stage of the business, you should constantly be working on building relationships and doing those kinds of things."
- What's the difference between B2C and B2B influencer marketing? B2B influencer marketing is still in its early stages of development, and users are still trying to figure it out. With that said, there are some significant differences between B2C and B2B influencer marketing. According to Jay, B2B influencer marketing is more transactional. "If it's a direct-to-consumer brand, you might be selling something that's maybe one time at $30, $40, $50. When it comes to B2B stuff, the transaction is typically a lot different. You might have some sort of recurring revenue model in there. The price might be a lot higher. Then decision-making might be a lot different, especially for consumers."
- Get good at identifying high-risers who will scale and grow with you. According to Jay, long-term influencer collaborations can be highly valuable for any business. Whether you're planning to start your first influencer marketing campaign or you're seeking new strategies for your business, he suggests focusing on the high risers on the market and helping them discover their hidden potential. Look for people that are great at creating content and that you can feel are going to continue to grow. "Those are the people that you want to work with because as you scale and you grow, they're going to also scale and grow, which means you can potentially deliver more impact, and you'll already have a relationship built with those things."
“Influencer marketing is a play that can be run at any stage of the business.”
Jay Desai
Founder
Swpely
Episode Highlights
How to Find Influencers in Your Niche For Free
“One of my favorite tools to kind of look at is Sparktoro. It does a great job of figuring out. First, you’ve got to figure out where your audience is living. It makes no sense to work with Twitter influencers if your buyers are on Instagram 97% of the time.So, Sparktoro is a great tool to figure out where your audience is living at. And once you’ve identified that, I think it also gives you some influencers as well as a good starting point, maybe some influential people over there. But the next step that I like to take and this is a $0 budget. You don’t have to spend anything on this. This is 100% free over here. But once you identify a couple of those people, who they are, if it’s Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever Instagram, actually search for those people. I know Instagram has it. Twitter has it as well. And LinkedIn has it also where you can scroll around and find and see more people like this. That is your best friend over there for this.”
The Importance of Equal Value Exchange
“I think the biggest thing you can do at the beginning is just engaging with their content. The reason people end up working together, for anything, take influencer marketing out of the situation is because there’s usually some sort of equal or close to equal value exchange that’s happening.Obviously, we want to be around people and work with people that help add value to our lives. People that we feel like we can add value in their lives. And so it’s the same exact thing when it comes to influencer marketing. And so when you’re thinking about what value can I provide to that creator, the best value you can provide that causes $0 upfront without having to give away anything or anything like that, it’s just engaging with their content because by engaging with their content, you’re literally helping to support that creator to get more discovery every time.”
Seek Influencers Who Know How to Communicate Your Brand’s Message
“It’s not about the followers. I mean, yeah, that’s an important piece. Obviously, you want to reach a bigger audience, but it’s really about the content more so than anything. When you’re doing influencer marketing and creative marketing, if you really want to get it right, you have to focus in on the people that can communicate super effectively, whatever format that is, video, written, audio, whatever that format is, those are the creators that you should be wanting to work with.First of all, because their audience is probably going to be more engaged, you probably just eyeball it and take a look. I promise you, those people will have way more engaged fans because they’re just delivering a lot of value, really concisely and well, versus someone that’s just like copying and pasting articles or just restating what everyone kind of knows. And so those are the creators you want to look for.”
