Matching Creators With Brands – It Can Get Tricky

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June 13, 2024

LOVELAND, CO – Why would a mommy lifestyle content video go viral with males in Pakistan? It’s an odd question, and it represents one of the many demographic inquiries that occasionally come up for Paul Baron (pictured below at Prosper Show 2024), founder and CEO of Influx Catalysts, Loveland, Colo.

Baron helps to match creators with brands—everything from one-off collaborations to multi-million dollar campaigns. In the case of the “mommy” creator/influencer, the problem is likely the result of paying for fake engagement, a practice that boosts numbers but fails to provide an authentic audience.

Prosper Show Newsletter sat down with Baron at a brewery in northern Colorado to learn more about matching creators with brands. As it turns out, it can get tricky.

Prosper Show: In the quest to match brands with creators, what’s an example of a success story? Baron: A few examples I can think of are how we drove $2,000,000 in sales in one campaign over about a month to SamsClub.com. Another we drove nearly $15,000,000 in revenue over six months to Walmart.com and in-store, and finally how we built brand ambassador communities for our current clients. Think of brand ambassadors as influencers light. Think of them as everyday people who actually have huge followings. It’s a real community of people who love your brand, and the reason why they’re promoting your brand is because they love it.

Prosper Show: What’s the difference between an ambassador community and influencers? Baron: Members of the ambassador community are not promoting the brand because they are getting paid. That’s the key difference. We see amazing results in the brand ambassador communities we build and manage for various clients’ brands.

Prosper Show: What was the situation with the mommy lifestyle brand when they came to you? Baron: When they came to us, they were already spending six to seven thousand dollars a month partnering with influencers. We did an audit of their spend. We used tools that are native to the Instagram & TikTok platforms—their creator marketplaces. IG Creator Marketplace is publicly available. If you don’t have access to it, it’s in beta and you can apply. Everybody also has access to TikTok Creator marketplace.

Prosper Show: What are you looking for? Baron: We primarily look for the demographic match. Does the person you’re partnering with have a following with the right demographic? For example, with someone doing mommy lifestyle content, it would be abnormal to have the majority of her following be males who are not based in America.

We may see things that are suspicious. If we have a mommy lifestyle creator, and 60% of her audience is male, and of that 60%, 20% is based in Pakistan—that person is paying for fake engagement. Why would a mommy lifestyle content video go viral with males in Pakistan? In the simplest version, that is one of many questions we would explore.

We verify that the creators you’re working with are legit and they are not paying for fake engagement. We verity that their audience demographics match, and that the content that they are producing is on brand.

Ultimately we look for a good match. Going back to that baby brand that we were working with; They were looking for brand ambassadors. One of the creators/ambassadors who applied—deeper down in his profile—he was rolling a giant joint. As a baby brand, that’s probably something that you want to avoid. Whatever your feelings are on marijuana, that’s fine, but typically speaking you want to have a wholesome image. We verify and vet for this and dozens of other details most people don’t think of.

Prosper Show: What were some of the numbers you found with the baby brand? Baron: As I mentioned earlier, with that brand they were spending six to seven thousand dollars a month paying for influencers. Eighty percent of those were just wrong.

Content was being made primarily on Instagram reels. When we started looking at the data of the people who were following these creators, at least 20% to 50% were clearly paying for fake engagement. The other 50% to 80% just had audience mismatch. We saved them money immediately by having them reallocate how they were investing this money.

Prosper Show: I spoke with Prosper Show speaker Dakota Morse last week and he mentioned that Instagram was “losing steam”. Do you agree? Baron: Yes, Instagram is definitely losing steam. I would have to look at the numbers, but they lost a ton of users last year. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be posting on it.

If you’re reading this, you need to download TikTok, or find a college kid who uses TikTok. Have that kid intern with you, or maybe pay him or her $20 bucks an hour literally to just watch TikTok in the desired niche, and come up with ideas for posting content on TikTok. Take that same content that you post on TikTok and post it on Instagram reels. I’m also excited about YouTube, but it is kind of another one of those giant slow moving ships.

Prosper Show: What are you liking about YouTube these days? Baron: Well they recently started adding shoppable content with the affiliate kind of model. I’m surprised it took them this long, so that’s intriguing.

Prosper Show: Any up-and-coming platforms that are catching your attention? Baron: Flip.shop is an exciting app. I know that Aaron Cordovez is a big seller on that and he’s a great guy—super smart. He is aggressive on Flip. There are a hand full of sellers who are aggressive on Flip.

Prosper Show: What about Meta (Facebook)? Baron: In general, Meta has a branding perception problem. They really are playing catch up. Sellers have Meta (Facebook) shops. The shop’s ads that we run for clients convert well. The challenge is that they don’t have the affiliate center. They have a creator marketplace that’s kind of half-assed in the sense that it’s there but they don’t really do a good job of promoting it to creators. It’s been in beta for over a year, and you can only access it by applying or being invited as a brand.

Prosper Show: Your Prosper talk was about leveraging TikTok shop, so I assume you are still bullish on the platform. Baron: Everybody wants to be TikTok right now. Meta is trying to be TikTok, but they’re not agile enough.

Prosper Show: What’s a misconception about TikTok Shop? Barron: A big misconception is that anybody can get on there and just make a boat load of money because everybody is doing it. That’s just not true. Sellers leave the ‘top of funnel’ aspects out of the picture because Amazon sellers are so spoiled with ‘bottom of funnel’ acquisition. They ask, ‘Why would I want to do traditional marketing or other marketing efforts?’ Ultimately, influencer marketing is more top and middle of funnel.

Part two of our conversation with Paul Baron will be coming soon in a future issue of the Prosper Show Newsletter.