The Influencer Marketing Playbook - with Lily Comba, Founder & CEO of Superbloom

Spent about $20 million on influencers, but, you know, saw a return to over $100 million. Lily from Super Bloom, excited to have you on chat all things influencer. Thanks for having me. In 2023 is when I launched Super Bloom, which is very much a culmination of my experience in performance influencer. I've been lucky enough to be in influencer marketing for 10 years now. Being an influencer marketer was kind of a dirty word. Being an influencer was a dirty word back then. Get weird with your campaigns. Think outside the box and constantly be iterating. YouTube is almost like traditional media buying. If someone has less than a 25% average watch time, you're not going to work with them because their viewers, 75% of the video is not being watched. Like no one cares what you're talking about. Any brand I know can be successful on YouTube. But if you're also a brand that has... All right, we're about to talk about all things influencer marketing. Super excited to get into this episode with Lily. But before we do, got to thank our sponsors. The show is not possible without them. Thank you to Motion, Rich Panel, Prescient AI, Aftersell, and Revo. as always if you like this episode please share it sure you're going to learn a lot from it take some notes let's get into it all right i am super pumped with motion's newest uh shipment of ai technology in their tool called analyze this so basically how it works is you create a report like usual you know slice the data however however you want whatever you're trying to get insight to once the report is pulled you just click analyze this it'll hold the report and then it'll send it right into your inbox And you can go into this report and it gives you a very, very detailed analysis of what's working, what's not working. And then ultimately it even goes into what you should do next based on the analysis that it's giving you. So just continuing to automate this analysis piece of creative strategy. And I'm very excited about it, how it's going to unlock more time and more production for creative strategy teams. 100%. And it's another example of how important critically analyzing creative is today with metas andromeda which we've talked about at length on the podcast creative diversity has never been more important but creative diversity to meta is a black box to marketers we don't know exactly what they think of as as new and different and unique so motions building native tools to help marketers guide us through that process and ultimately lead to better performance so a few specific examples we've been using it for at hex cloud lately we just launched a new product category in and we launched some social funnels around it so i used it to analyze all the cocktail shaker ads that we ran and it gave me super clear uh very actionable insights and then a even bigger report and even harder to do manual report was looking at all of our gordon ramsey ads from september 1st through yesterday like think about if you know ridge was going to look at all of its everyday carry ads like that is literally hundreds maybe thousands of ads and it's one thing to be able to pull that report but it's totally different thing to be able to pump literally millions of dollars of data into the analyze this report and have that analysis spit out in a fraction of the time that it would take you know a team of creative strategists to do it manually so very exciting stuff very very uh different use cases so it just shows the breadth that this new feature of the product um has so if you're a marketer that wants the insights of motion go to motionapp.com and tell them that the operator sent you all right lily how are you doing lily from super bloom excited to have you on chat all things influencer i'm doing well thanks for having me yeah after about 30 minutes of behind the scenes guys by the way so we finally made it but I feel like a true influencer, you know? Yeah, I'm sure it's nothing you haven't seen before. Awesome. Well, excited to chat. Excited to have you on. You know, excited to learn. I learned a lot working with you. I don't know how long it's been. Maybe six months. So excited for people to kind of see, you know, what goes into building this influencer program. Let's do a quick, you know, bio. Would love to just hear about your background and then see where it goes. Yeah. um i've been lucky enough to be in influencer marketing for about it's coming up on 10 years now um and 10 years ago it was called business development it wasn't even you know being an influencer marketer was kind of a dirty word being an influencer was a dirty word back then um i got my start um actually freelancing during uh My first job out of college was at a traditional ad agency, specifically an out of home, which was interesting, but also really boring. And as a new grad, it was kind of like side hustle culture was at an all time high. And so I started working very softly in just partnerships, marketing, helping mostly female entrepreneurs get connected to publishers, online magazines, et cetera. I love that. I love the dot connecting. And so I got my first full time job in business development. also considered influencer marketing at Thrive Market and I was there for about four years started as a coordinator kind of really learning the ropes getting down into the weeds of influencer marketing which is still to this day a very administratively heavy channel but made my way up to a manager where I was overseeing the YouTube pipeline of talent and that program was one of a kind it was also the first you know, one of the very early brands to adopt influencer as a key channel of theirs. And it was all through the performance lens. So I've always been trained to work with influencers through a CPA or a ROAS model. And then in 2020, that is when Seed Health, the probiotics company hired me to create and launch their paid influencer program. I was there for two and a half years spent. pretty penny uh spent about 20 million dollars on influencers but you know saw a return over 100 million and that was really when i was like oh okay i might be pretty good this works yeah this this might work um and so then um from seed to super bloom which i did not realize that how cute that is um in 2023 is when i launched super bloom which is very much a culmination of my experience in performance influencer um But the best part about running an agency with no agency experience is we don't really follow a rule book. So probably some pros and cons to that. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea what I was doing, but I feel like most companies, when you start, you're like, what's going on? I have an idea. Let's see if it works. You know, it's funny. I don't know if I ever told you this, but I connected. I don't know who it was, but connected with somebody on the seed health. growth team probably like two years back, maybe three years back. Cause I was just like needed to learn really about their like partnership ad whitelisting program. Cause I would just like see it was so successful. So it was, uh, I was an admirer of your work for, for a long time. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we, um, that was thrive market had a really robust whitelisting. I did not seed. Obviously we worked. i worked very closely um with the performance marketing and paid media team and i did not realize how unique that was until i launched super bloom and so many brands were like we should be using influencer content on meta i was like yeah let me let me help you understand this a little bit more we we very much take a mentorship approach to all of our our brand partnerships but yeah that was the the synergy between the paid team and the influencer team was really tight at seed it seems like it seems like it was very like growth oriented like yes was it was on the was it on the growth team or it was similar but it seems like it was like one of the big growth levers of the company right uh yeah i reported to um i don't know if it was his name was v i think vp of growth um we fell under the growth team but when i joined the company was still small enough where i was working with the head of you know organic social crm like we that was a big reason why I think the seed program was so successful was obviously the methodology that we approached the influencer channel with, but how omni how cross channel collaborative it was. And especially in those early days, by the time that I left, the program was so big, the company was so big that we weren't necessarily siloed, but we had our own goals and we were just kind of we were just a machine. But I learned a lot during my time there. Yeah, that's cool. And how would Superboom come about? Like, how would you link up with, obviously, the Super Affiliate guys? Yeah. So I actually love this story because in 2020, so Super Affiliate initially launched as a solution for referral and loyalty programs. And I think Andy and Anders started at 2019, 2020 when they were... roommates that their whole story is really hilarious to me. But they wanted to get into affiliate and influencer. And their best friend, John was the head of supply chain at seed. And John was like, you should really talk to Lily because she knows what she's doing. And if you need if you need a voice of reason within the influencer and affiliate space, you should really talk to her. So I first met them in 2021. And we just kind of talked on a monthly, sometimes quarterly basis as they were creating tools and features within Superfiliate for the affiliate and influencer marketer. And then at the end of 2022, early 2023, I knew that my time was expiring at Seed. And in one of our conversations, they were like, would you ever go off on your own? Would you ever start an agency? Like, what do you have? What's on the docket for Lilly? And that's truly how their belief in me and the partnership that we developed together from a tech and industry expert perspective, I was like, it's now or never. If not me, who? If not now, when? Let's go. And so that's how the really deep partnership between Superfiliate and Superbloom began. And still to this day, that is the anchor of our relationship with them. We are their sister agency. All of our brands are on Superfiliate. And it's just fun to be building the software that I never had. That's cool. That's really cool. Yeah, I love them. Andres and Andy are so great. Funny story about Andres. This is like the first time I met him was at the Meta Performance Summit in San Jose like a bunch of months back. And there was this guy speaking on stage who like like great presentation from like one of the big agencies but was wearing like very cool clothes and like i dress like i wear the same every day like i dress very plain i'm like i wish i had that like i wish i had that swag and i was just like thinking about it that's not me and then right after andres goes up to the guy he's like dude where'd you get this outfit i want to get it it was so funny i'm like yeah andres is a cool guy like exactly unders unders is kind of like a trendy cool guy too oh and he's just like a sweet guy from kentucky you know like the two of them together are just truly iconic like ecom incubator stuff like yeah they're right they're right that is a funny like origin story it's like og like silicone valley vibes like let's all live under the same house and like just jam all day until a good company comes out of it and their entire friend group is like remarkable um you know the book outliers by malcolm gladwell i feel like there's going to be a second version that just analyzes their friend group like because truly yeah all right i have the pleasure of telling you about our sponsor revo which is a retention platform for shopify plus brands they cover everything from accounts to loyalty referrals memberships store credit wallet passes and more Ridge is a loyal user as well as Hexclad, Dr. Squatch, True Classic, Portland Leather Goods, Kitsch, LSKD, Princess Polly, Pit Viper, Graza, and hundreds more brands. 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It is totally free. for all shopify plus stores go to revo.io today to check it out what are some brands that you can obviously jones road number one but what are some brands that you work with or have worked with like that you can tell us i mean i didn't ask for permission from any of them but they all you know it's just jones road then jones road is our only yeah we will sink if you guys break up with us no um coop sleep goods uh i mean we have a really strong retention with our brands and so um i would like jones or beauty is obviously one of our brands coupe sleep goods bobby the infant formula company um stasis and thesis have been with us for a while their program has evolved a ton um oats overnight you know adapt naturals like we really um we're all of our brands are very anchored in disrupting their category which makes the influencer channel a lot more innovative and and quite frankly successful so Yeah. And I feel like when we're talking influencer, it could mean anything. There's so many different ways to run an influencer program. I guess let's start getting into it. What kind of scope, how do you guys run the program or how do you think about it? Yeah, we have. So it's actually remarkable to just see the evolution of our services since we started two and a half years ago, because a lot of it is still the same, but a lot of it is also. us observing what's happening in the industry and making sure that our brands are staying relevant um and i think that's really important as an agency that's our responsibility is to make sure that our brands are successful that they're staying up to speed on the trends that we're seeing um and i never had that experience with an agency when i was at seed or thrive market um and so i'm really proud of our evolution because we still to this day our core kind of foundation offering is traditional organic influencer where brands come to us and they're like we have a set monthly budget spend it wisely um to put it very simply um but our approach to influencer is always through the performance lens or the growth lens like we yeah we can report on impressions and awareness and and reach and you know sentiment and our media value absolutely um but our key differentiator and what we're really good at is identifying creators, negotiating deals and briefing them in a way where brands will also see revenue conversions and really strong CPA and ROAS numbers. That takes time. you know your some brands depending on depending on the campaign depending on the timing depending on everything like you'll hit your goals in month one but it usually takes three months to kind of really get going and that's still our core offering so we call it organic influencer but we are negotiating paid usage rights for every single deal that we secure because that's so that is a huge priority to us to extend the longevity and the livelihood of that influencers organic posting we get the raw files the edited files and then we send them to the paid media team to run run in as an ad themselves so the influencers handle you can test it from the brand's handle um and we're actually running white listing for a handful of brands of ours right now as well that's something that i really want to expand into next year like we are lucky to be connected just to some of the best paid media performance marketers um and we already have we have two brands on that skew right we literally just launched it a couple months ago kind of under the table um but we're seeing really strong success there um and it's my goal to really kind of own performance influencer for our brands. So not only working with influencers in organic capacity, but being able to once the influencer posts the same day, their ad launches because that efficiency and that speed is really critical for success. So those are two of our SKUs. And then one that we are also working with Cody on for Jones Road is this like performance creative or UGC SKU. We have a handful of brands that are on a hybrid model. So we're running their organic influencer program where we're also building out in addition to all of that creative, we're also sourcing UGC assets to just run on paid. And brands can either do both or they can just lean into organic influencer or just performance creative. the important thing is just, we will look at your brand and try to, and really understand what it is that your goals are and customize a proposal for what we think will be successful. And, and just both the clever, but you see, it's like, it's essentially whitelisting. It's just, they're not posting, but it's safe. It's not like the, like, there's still like more like influencers, I would say, versus like, uh, you know, like a $300 content creator. Like they're still, yeah, but no, I mean, you guys are the only people I've seen that get whitelisting rights. as part of every deal which is wild it's imperative it's i think it's because i quite quite honestly don't know any different that's just like it's what we did at thrive it's what i did at seed it's just like it's baked into my influencer marketing dna and it's baked into um you know the the women on my team it's just it's it's their nature you know it's really important for us to make sure that we are enabling the brand to be successful with influencer I love how you talk about your services in such a productized way. I love how you're talking about SKUs. I know in my experience, because I came from an agency background too, and you just want to do everything for your brands, no matter what it is. And you're like, you just want to provide value, provide value, provide value. But if you don't have your services super productized, you just end up with scope creep galore. burnout galore and then you like there's just somebody so many gray like where does our work end and begin so i love hearing you talk about your your offerings like skews because like here's skew one skew two skew three it's very clear that you guys have a very well-defined scope of work and like here's what we do and here's what we don't do i think it's it's refreshing to hear like services business services founder talk about their product offering like that Yeah, I mean, it's probably because I'm a CPG junkie that I just speak in SKUs all the time. I'm like, well, when is that SKU launching? I'm like, that is not. And that's just, you know, I've, you know, perfect example that I come from in-house where you talk about SKU all the time. So, yeah, our agency is very much built by in-house people, which I also think helps differentiate us in our output. I want to I want to ask you something specifically about your like organic social bit. Because like we at Hexclad, we, you know, for a long time, like we're thinking about organic, I think the wrong way. And we were thinking about it from like, I want to measure traffic. I want to measure revenue. I want to like assign a ROAS and a CPA. And it just felt like we were marching towards the wrong KPIs, especially with our products. We're like our hero product is a $700 set. Most of these influencer activations that we're doing are reaching new audiences. it's not the right approach for us to think that like we're gonna activate with a brand new creator, do four organic posts with them and see like a ton of revenue because we have a very, very long consideration period. So we actually, we shifted the KPIs that we optimize our organic influencer to be more impression and CPM based. And like we are purely trying to arbitrage impressions and CPMs with our organic influencer deals. And then We have, you know, some deals that are a little bit more like revenue oriented, but then it's really the paid ecosystem where we're really focused on like, all right, let's get a bunch of spend behind this and drive revenue. So like, that's how we think about our influencer program is like organics, all about impressions and CPMs. And like, those are the KPIs that we set and that our like influencer team is held accountable to is like impression growth targets. And then the influencer or the paid team is. all about revenue spend return on ad spend all like the classic performance metrics so what are you seeing on on the organic influencer side for the brands that are like effectively driving trackable revenue like a what like what's the um what's kind of like the dna of those brands and like their products and then b how are you setting those like like very tactically speaking like how are you set like orchestrating those organic posts so you can track revenue like is it discount code short links with utms like what's the like the mechanics of the of that content and those influencer posts that y'all have found to work the best yeah um well and i just want to say too that you have to test and learn and the heck hexglide is a perfect example of that where you launch your influencer program thinking that it was going to be bottom of funnel and it wound up being more beneficial for you to just have top of funnel uh kpis um that's A lot of our brands are simply bottom of funnel. But one thing that I have observed is more and more brands are understanding the benefit. Influencer is a full funnel channel. It is a rising tide that lifts all boats. It's going to generate site traffic. Google search increases. You're going to see lapsed customers come back because an influencer posted about your brand. There's a very wide halo effect to influencer. For our more bottom of funnel, partners and brands um how we even the brands that are doing well with organic influencer actually have a higher aov but not 700 um because especially like coop sleep goods for instance like their their aov is in the low hundreds closer to 200s um and what we've noticed is that that is a successful row as based program because the influencer doesn't have to sell as much product in order to hit a certain ROAS goal. And so that is actually one of the early screener questions that we have when determining if we can work with the brand, if they will be successful with influencers, is we ask about AOV because depending on your AOV, you'll either be successful within a CPA model or a ROAS model, or we would advise more of an impressions and awareness based approach. So you know, that just to talk about the part of the funnel. But in order to make a program successful from a performance lens and, you know, to drive sales, the base, the most basic thing is enabling the influencer with a link in code. I some brands are successful with a landing page experience. Some brands are successful with just a direct redirect to the PDP. Like Jones, our beauty is a great example of that. We thought we started our program with landing pages and we're like, no. if people want makeup they just want to go to the exact product that that influencer was talking about and purchase the shade that they want and call it a day um and so you have you obviously that was through testing and learning and pivoting very quickly um but enabling the influencer with a code and link having you know software that can give you a really strong attribution and a good understanding of what that the customer journey is um but something that we've also been really successful at and bobby is a bobby infant formula is a really good example of this is get weird with your campaigns um think outside the box and constantly be iterating obviously if it ain't broke don't fix it like that was that was what at seat i also think it was a time in a place like 2020 everyone was thinking about their health and optimizing their immune systems etc and so there was so much longevity to just a 15 discount it lasted for two years And we saw no need to change. But as the influencer landscape gets way more competitive, staying relevant from how you're briefing your creators, the campaign that they're a part of, how you're utilizing that influencer content across organic social as a brand, paid social as a brand, CRM, email, SMS. You got to make sure that you're breaking through the noise. do we always struggle with discount code leakage like oh my existence like we will launch a discount like if it's a any site-wide discount code is going to leak within seven days and it's like all of a sudden we're going and looking at like UTM it's like this person drove 400 like sessions via their UTM, but they have like 188 discount code use. So I'm like, there's that's not right. There's no way they have. Yeah, somebody can fix this. There's a lot of value in it. Oh my God. I think, Cody, we're laughing because this is a problem we're having. And I will say, so I'm a growth marketer disguised as an influencer marketer. If you haven't picked that up yet. And for me, I'm like a sale is a sale. Code leakage. Amazing. That's still a new customer. The issue. for influencer there's two issues the first one is if you're paying that influencer commission they did not just they did not earn that sale if someone picked up their code and they're earning commission on a code that they did not generate organically themselves that's the first issue the second issue is that you know you may see an influencer generated three per 300 purchases and you want to renew with them and you're way more flexible in that negotiation because you're like well you crushed it for us um as an agency like we we understand that codes leak and so we we have a good eye for when that happens and there's a lot of there's a lot of checks and balances to determine if it was leaked or if it was true performance and the first one is you know if you see conversions in revenue in whatever software you're using compare that to the link clicks is that Is it on par with what you're used to seeing with influencers or what the site-wide click-through rate is? That's the first thing. But the true determination is when you get there. So after an influencer posts, you always need to request their post campaign insights so that you can see from their true back end what happened. And if an influencer sends you a screenshot of an Instagram story, for instance, and they only got 27 link clicks, but 300 purchases, you're like. something does not add up here. And that's when you can create, and this is what we've done for Jones Road. It's when you create not only a multiplier to be like, this is actually the performance of this influencer. So you identify a multiplier based on your program averages, based on the influencer's averages. And then you also create a custom click-through rate for your influencer program, because that may be different than what is normal for the site. I think we're handling it okay. It's an always on program unless you want, unless your platform that you're using can do one-time use codes. That's the only solution is one-time use codes. But I'm a consumer or all consumers. I'm going to remember someone's code and purchase maybe three weeks after they've promoted a brand. So it really is up. It's up to, it's up to you. You decide. Like, do you want to just be on it with code leakage and just monitor things knowing that people have name recognition of codes or do you just want to eliminate any you know, potential error and just do one time use codes. Black Friday, you're about to crush it. The real job is keeping that momentum going past Black Friday, past holiday and all the way into next year. Prescient helps brands turn peak season wins into predictable, profitable velocity. Powered by a suite of proprietary machine learning models and a causality first validation layer, Prescient reveals what actually drove Lyft. It combines surveys. It combines multi-touch attribution and incrementality. And then it forecasts where your next dollar of media will drive real incremental profit. Top brands like Coterie, Guess, Hexclad, Jones Road Beauty, Mary Roos, and many more are using Prescient to quantify halo effects across Shopify, Amazon, retail, so their teams know exactly where to reinvest. So what actual questions can Prescient help you answer? Let's dig into it a little bit. Question number one. Do I need to increase, decrease, or reallocate spend for the shopping season? Prescient shows the optimal media mix to drive the strongest Q4 performance, whether your budget grows or shrinks. Question number two, where should I put additional Q4 budget? Prescient delivers recommendations based on current BFCM dynamics, your vertical, and your optimal ad spend allocation. Question number three, can Prescient measure cross-channel effects, especially between Shopify and Amazon? yes prescient uniquely tracks halo effects and ad impact across both platforms revealing where to dial back and where to double down this is actually one of the very first problems that hex cut on boarded with prescient to solve is understanding the total impact across both.com and amazon over ad spend prescient's models are benchmarked against six billion dollars in ad spend so the recommendations you are getting aren't just theory they've actually been tested against billions of real media dollars and if you are ready to see where your next dollar media will drive the most profit Visit pressionai.com slash operators to forecast your growth with Prussian. Can I ask about the, how does that multiplier bit work? Because I think that's an interesting thing. And you see that like this idea, this whole like multiplier idea, this is really, it's not unique to like what you're doing, right? Like marketers are doing this across their entire measurement stack. Like I think one of the big examples we look at is we'll run holdouts in house. We'll get a readout on house and then we'll make a multiplier between the channel that we were running a holdout on or the tactic we were running the holdout on and then whatever the best day-to-day decision-making tool is. So a lot of times you'll see people saying, hey, our multiplier between this house result and this readout in MTA is X. We know if we're at this in the North Beam MTA, that we'll be here in terms of blended cost per incremental order. So that allows... marketers to take a test that maybe took two and a half months to run and translate it to a tool that they can make daily decisions on. So they can constantly see how they're performing, have a relationship and make quicker decisions. So how are you doing that with the influencer performance numbers and discount code usage and stuff? Very similarly. And I will say too, that every brand's multiplier is different. And if you have an agency that is saying it's a 20%, 30% multiplier across the board, that is just, that's simply not true. Because every brand is different. Every AOV is different. The product different. The customers are different. Everything is different. And so it's honestly quite simple. We have all these checks and balances to determine what the true performance for that influencer was from that click-through rate, from that conversion percentage. That's how we come up with our multiplier. I want to share like our journey and like what it's been. I feel like it's like a good example to answer a lot of that. So we started internally. So prior to working with Lily, like this January of doing like paid influence stuff. And we were looking at it brand first. We were working with more of a brand focused beauty agency. And we probably didn't spend enough, but we'd spend, you know, 50K. And we'd be like, all right, like, what do we get? We got, here's our EMV. here's our awareness. And I'm like, all right, is that good? You know, and it's like, we weren't at the size of a brand where it's like, we're going to, you know, now we have track suit on board. And so we're looking at awareness lift and things like that. But that wasn't really like our goal. We were in between. So it's like, I don't, I want to scale the program. I want to get more white listing access, stuff like that. But like, I'm never going to be able to scale it at, you know, not having any revenue. So, you know, that was when we started working with Superbloom and considering it more of a, more of a performance channel. And I think the thought is like, this is a it's going to hopefully break even right um we can or or make some profit it there's definitely awareness there that is you know kind of part of that multiplier but even better that that you're building um but obviously we can't just have it be just an awareness channel um and then you also get all of the value especially because you guys are not having to pay extra for the rights that it feeds your ad account you know so it's like what is, I think that's where we're even trying to figure out right now. And I'm really trying to, cause I want to continue to grow and scale those channels. Like what is our multiplier? Cause first is it's clearly, there is good amount of revenue that you see on a click, right? It's especially for Instagram. It's not going to just be all, you know, uh, views and people searching or code. Um, but there's the challenges that you guys identified with the, with the codes. A lot of people are just not going to use them. There's going to be some people that don't click. but don't use code as well. And maybe they buy different devices. Right. We also, because we're not discounting. I think there's less incentive to use our codes for a gift with purchase compared to another one. Yeah. So like, we're probably at like a 0.7.8 ROAS right now. And like, that's probably great. Like we should probably, my guess is we should probably scale that. And like, that's great. If you consider multiplier plus awareness, plus if we took, by the way, if we took 20% of that cost, removed it from our organic influencer. program. Now we're above a one. And so that's my, that's my guess because we can't do a house geo lift test. We, a house has told me we need to get to 2% of our media mix for it to work in our MMM. So in our media mix model. So that's where we're trying to get to. Um, but that's kind of, that's like how, how we're approaching it and going about it. I think October was our third month of testing with our organic influencer. And that's when we saw like a clean 1X ROAS, which is kind of typical. That's what I preface. I'm like, give it a couple months. And Cody is incredible to work with because you just, I mean, you just get under, you understand funnels. Well, no, no, because I made mistakes before because we started in January and I didn't spend enough and I didn't commit for a quarter. and it's how you structure the deals and how you negotiate like there's this whole playbook right um and i think that it is not depending on your category as a brand and depending on this november and december as we all know are very difficult ones like you can either it's incredibly competitive it's way more expensive on the meta side or the influencer side they're like oh holiday pricing you know we don't buy into any of that but um so it's normal also for your performance to ebb and flow based on year based on the year based on the seasonality based on how competitive it is um i will just put put that on there could you walk through some like either maybe using your the numbers you just gave cody or like just dummy numbers like what how you would like think about like what's the step wise for setting the multiplier like with some actual numbers so like cody you said you guys are getting like a 0.7x uh indirectly attributable but you know that like only a fraction of what that influencer driving is driving is going to come through like the link or the code and then there's obviously a bunch of halos so like i just i'm trying to like what's the what's like the yeah i'll get some numbers i just pulled up i just pulled up our campaign tracker i got the math right here i'm gonna give i'm gonna make up numbers yeah my word is listening these are not real numbers these are not real numbers yeah yeah shireen need a 5x ro s just want you to know um In October, we were actually at a one. In November, maybe performance was softer, but also we had a lot go live at the end of the month for a holiday. That maybe hasn't materialized. Let's say we spend 100K and we got 70K back in directly attributable revenue, which is mostly click, maybe some code. Again, we know that there's some type of a multiplier for click. because that's what that's probably i don't know lily what window are we tracking clicks on you know what standard is where we're at i would have to check i think it might be it's not as long as it could be i think we're at maybe 14 or 30 days um which is standard yeah so there's still gonna be some multiplier yeah there's still gonna be some multiplier of cross device that you know things like that um there's also going to be you know the code usage so uh i think we're saying it's like a 1.4 it's like our current guess based on the click versus code but you can share more on that yeah well basically what we did it so we started to see code leakage in october um but the difference was nominal it's like code lee october with leakage was a 1.32 october without leakage was a 1.18 roas so nominal difference but As consumers pick up on the fact that a brand is working with influencers, the more likely your codes are to leak. So you're just going to be doing this practice on a regular basis. It's just, just get comfortable with it. So what we did is we did conversions clicks, click to purchase ratio with leakage and without leakage. From what we spent, from the revenue that we generated, we then using that click to purchase ratio, we determined ROAS and CPA. We also, you know, we mark AOV did not change. So that's also a good thing is that the codes that leaked, those weren't, I can't swear, they weren't crappier customers. So that's actually kind of rare because usually customers that come through leaked codes tend to be lower quality. we'll have to analyze the retention of those specific customers, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. So from, it's really like from the click to purchase ratio and the difference between the leaked ratio and the non-leaked ratio, that's how you can determine your multiplier. We did not have all codes get leaked. It was only three influencers, but it was. i mean they got that they got leaked big time um like maybe 81 conversion 72 53 like that's a lot to me that's a lot of leakage but we basically took the influencers leaked conversions compared that to their clicks what was that click to purchase ratio and then what we could from that we can basically their expected conversions so this one influencer that i'm looking at her expected she was smaller we expected three from her she generated 81. That's a pretty good leak. Yeah. So and then what about on the other side of it? Like the people that you just know are like they saw the Jones Road Beauty content, but naturally not everyone's going to click that link or type in that short URL. Like, do you have a do you have a way to also add a multiplier like on the on the side where people are going above the the funnel that you've intended like their audience to follow? That's kind of what we're figuring out right now. Yeah, that's tough. That's like that's like a really hard part. yeah it can be i mean yeah there's there's there's value i think that's the thing it's like so we're trying to figure out like our what is our click row ask the same way right connor like we'll talk about doing it for a youtube channel or do you know doing it for for meta ads um and then you know we we kind of just decide this arbitrarily but we because we're getting ad rights for 30 days to all this stuff we take 20 of that cost so it's really 20k of the hundred and so we're our like that brings our row is better we're just like hey that 20k we're going to code that to add creative rather than influencer because you know that's what we think the value is worth so there's i think there's that there's even just i think longer term awareness that gets built from this that is maybe less of a you know performance thing but there's obviously clear value so my hunch and i guess and we're also talking about like again one percent of our media mix like we've talked about it with like connor mcdonald before it's like you know if we're spending 5 million a month on digital ads, we should probably be spending 100K to 200K plus on influencer, you know? We've got a plan for you to do that. We're getting there. We're getting there. We sent our budget proposal, I think, yesterday. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of what you were talking about, just speaking to, it's like this halo effect of if your brand, and maybe we had this happen at Seed where it's like, oh, it's everywhere. like you can't you can't avoid getting a seed ad or seeing an influencer speak about seed that is harder a lot harder to do nowadays um but it is it's like part of this halo effect that cody was talking about where there's there's more there's more to it than just the cold hard numbers that you're seeing and you have brands that you're like so like more more hex cloud where like we've got like we're just looking at our we've been pulling our year over year you know we're doing our recap right now we're like 1.3 billion impressions and tag social content alone because we seed a ton we have people like gordon obviously who rack in you know 50 million on their own maybe not 50 but a lot so like on that i always think like that simplifies the organic influencer play a lot right because now you don't have to set up all the discount codes you don't have to set up all the short urls there's a lot less like logistical, like post mechanic conversations happening. And I think that's like the most, I think that's the most under, um, appreciated or under aware component of influencer programs is the amount of comms happening between like an internal influencer, an agency team and the actual influencer is insane. There's so much back and forth going on, but obviously that gets a lot less, um, when you're not doing like all of like the, the performance stuff. So yeah, like if you have, if you had 10, brands at c or at uh at super bloom sorry what what percent would you say are like really leaning into like what jones road is doing right now where they're like doing more of like organic performance versus what hex cloud is doing where i'd say for every you know we we usually don't have like the whole like sometimes like we just launched our cocktail shaker that's when we did have like a whole short link utm schema because we wanted to understand like where was our traffic coming from totally new category but i'd say the vast majority we're not doing that it's like what's your like split do you think in brands optimizing for like performance revenue roas versus like impressions not like volume of tag content etc well a hundred percent of our brands are performance all of them um i think maybe literally one one of our brands um is uh understanding that and it's it's bobby infant formula um where we are we we have been working them with them the whole year actually um and their cmo is a genius and if you have not had her on your podcast you absolutely should talk about um yeah yeah i love kim she's great we talked about having her on actually oh she's just the best and like My favorite, this is a total tantrum. My favorite thing about being on the agency side is actually we learn a lot from our brands. Like, yes, we come to the table as channel experts, but there's just so much that we learn. And learning from Kim and the entire Bobby team, like they under, it's infant formula. Most people are going to buy that in retail. Their D2C sales are incredible. But we have been, that has been one of our more impressions and awareness leaning. brand out of all of our other brands and we have worked with them throughout this entire year you know working in partnership with their paid media team to be like okay yes this influencer posted now let's make sure we're running it as an ad and just kind of establishing that also almost like a muscle memory within their organization um but they they're a unicorn like there's just something about bobby where and i think it's because it's quite literally a life or death product for an infant um if that is the formula that you're using you're going to continue using it for the entire year that a baby is on formula um but that influencer program is so top of funnel but they have really strong conversions on site and that was also another brand where we started with landing pages and then within the last couple of months we saw that they weren't performing as well so we're just redirecting to the website now So I would, to go back to your percentage, 100% of our brands with like some asterisks. Right. Yeah. Some of them we had to get them there. Like that's our ultimate goal is like, even if we start with a program that is retail focused or impressions and awareness based, like our ultimate goal is to make sure that there is always some performance element, because I think some brands get that influencer can be performance. Some brands don't. Our job is to get every brand to understand that. there is untapped benefit to working with influencers. Makes sense. All right, I want to give a shout out to RichPanel because they've quietly become one of the most impactful tools we use at Ridge. You know how SaaS companies love raising prices for the same product every year? Our old support platform did that one too many times, so we made the switch over to RichPanel, and the results have been fantastic. Our SaaS build dropped by about half, and once they rebuilt our workflows with automation, self-service, routing, our cost per ticket fell 70%. Same team, same volume, totally different outcome. BFCM this year was our smoothest we've ever been. We've done the most amount of sales. We had the most amount of queries, but with routing, we had a lower cost per ticket and our NPS scores have never been higher. The team handled everything without the usual panic and our CSAT has been sitting around 96% every week. And what I really like is that Rich Panel isn't just software, they bring a playbook. They rebuild your workflow, set up your AI, handle migration and training, and you can be live in under two weeks. The lift is basically zero on your side. And they're launching returns portal soon, which I'm really excited to test because returns are one of those sneaky P&L items everyone ignores until it begins to cost you real money. If you want to cut support costs in half and run a leaner, more efficient operation, head to richpanel.com slash demo and they'll take care of everything. You guys are really good at negotiating. How do you think about going about these deals? What do brands need to know if they're going to try to do this themselves? what is important because because what I found is a doing it before you guys still doing some on the side is like yeah people will request very high numbers do you guys have like a framework or how you go about about this process uh yes um I am big on integrity and accountability when it comes to negotiating and also when it comes to just contractual obligations of an influencer and and holding them accountable to their performance but not in like a mean way um so i always like numbers don't lie so that is how we anchor our negotiations um influencers are more expensive than ever and that does not scare me that doesn't i don't shake in my boots like that it's you get someone's media kit you get their rates and you ask for the full picture so and it varies based on platform it varies depending on instagram youtube podcast sub stack newsletter etc ticked off there's there's you request enough data um to predict how that influencer is going to perform and that is how you anchor your negotiation um And I am also, I was at a conference earlier this week and I was talking to someone who's a bit more junior and influencer and they had recently worked with a bigger influencer that completely flopped. I was like, well, have you shared performance with her team yet? Like with the talent managers, like you can do that. I was like, yeah, yes. Like you should absolutely be community. Like that is how you develop a partnership. That's how you develop a relationships. That's how talent managers get easier to work with. hopefully there are some that are it's just impossible um but it's just a it's a matter of being like in the early stages of negotiating being like these are the engagement this is the engagement that i have calculated for this influencer based on this engagement this is what i can pay him or her or them for partnership and then after they've posted communicating how they performed and what we can do to optimize and are they open to a make good if you know in order they're so close to hitting our goals if you hit this goal we can renew with you just gamifying it in a little way but it all comes back to just showing up in that relationship and so like you're just to be super clear and obviously i know a little bit of it but you're you're saying you almost like model out performance and so you'll get their stats you'll get their ig stats or newsletter stats whatever it is you're like hey this is what we think the click through it's going to be this is what we think the conversion rate is going to be at this rate you're requesting we can't break even like can you do it for this number is that is that correct yeah and i've always i've always been that way Like, and sometimes one part about like using that approach to negotiate too is when you say like, I actually think you're going to generate 500 conversions. You would make more money on a commission-based model and you write out that math and then you get them to agree to more of like an affiliate commission-based model versus a flat fee. There are very few, far fewer influencers nowadays that will agree. to commission and it's mostly because a lot of them have talent management and splitting taking a percentage taking like a talent manager you know commission it just gets a little bit more complicated um but that's also kind of like a fun benefit to negotiating too and it's in it you're in negotiations Our goal is obviously to set the brand up for success, but it's also to set the influencer up for success. Like if I think you're going to make more money on a commission-based model, that's a win-win all around. Because if you do flop, the brand didn't just invest a bunch of money and so on. Can I ask a follow-up, selfishly, because I'm like curious about these higher AOV brands. One of the ways we've thought about this in the past is we have like a pretty good idea of like the percent of our orders based on survey data that come like within a week a month three to 12 months 12 plus 24 months from from discovery so you know one of the ways we've like started like in the past i've thought about this is if we let's say we know that like 10 orders come in from an influencers post attributed in that first week from like uh a discount code or a utm based If we know that like only 10% of our orders come in, all of our orders come in in a week or less from discovery, then we could in theory say, well, if we, we could almost model out like, well, if 10 orders came in within a week and we only, we know that blended only 10% of our orders come in, we could almost say, well, we can create like a multiplier where it's like. We know 90% of our orders are going to come in over the course of like a year and a half or two years. So we can almost model that out and use that initial number to say like, okay, we can multiply this. I don't know exactly what the math would be off the top of my head, but whatever, like 90% growth to get to 100% of orders on 10 would be, and you can model it out. So do you have any like high AOV brands selling like three, four, $500 products that you've like kind of cracked this and have been able to create a, like a model that. that makes sense where they're able to use the immediate sales data and traffic to like auto out a longer tail of that performance and for that influencer we um our highest aov brand is around 200 250. um and i want to say that our our program with them is so successful the same day in influencer posts. I would say that more so, yeah, AOV to me, and this could be an area, honestly, for me to kind of explore more and learn more about, but AOV is how we determine and predict kind of what your goals should be, ROAS or CPA, et cetera. For us, for me, it's channel-based. what you can, how you can expect performance to continue or change over time. And like Instagram stories expire after 24 hours. So, you know, it's like you got 24 hours to see kind of how that's going to convert. Reels live on forever, but they also die down with the algorithm. Like things don't really reviralize like they do on, say, YouTube. YouTube, it's like the influencer posts and you want yes you'll see conversions come in within the first 24 hours of them uploading their youtube video but you also want to be looking 14 days 30 days 60 days 90 days often uh analyzing how that first youtube video performed so for me that's more so um how you can see you know performance or moving through over time it's more channel based for influencer right yeah i'm just thinking how we can model it Because to your point, like, yes, an Instagram reel is going to have its moment in the sun for a day or two. But how can we model that out overall? As long as you get some signal in that that first day or week or whatever, like you should be able to. Yeah, I think I think what we're boiling down to is like there is a way to model everything. And like having a model, even if it's imperfect, is better than having no model at all, because then you can make it. You can at least make you're going to make a better decision. And of course, like you need to. pulse check your model to make sure it's not rooted in like right not nothing that's not in reality but like having a model to like back into is better than having build your model based on what you've tested don't be afraid of testing don't be afraid of making a mistake like the old like you have to you have to invest at some point at some level and from from the testing that you do give it a three-month test determine your multipliers determine your model i mean that's also a really short amount of time um so you can have program modeling and you can also have like per influencer as as well and that's a good point too because like so like i know youtube is doing well for us so we're going to shift more to there like we shouldn't just have like a program-wide model Yeah. Because it's obviously that's going to shift as well. But we'd love to chat about YouTube a little bit. Like, I don't know. I love YouTube. I'm trying to learn more about it. But talk about YouTube. Obviously, you said it's a little bit longer tail. Do you see less clicks there? Like, do you think that's more of a view-based channel than something like Instagram? It's clicks for us because we always have, you know, the description top of fold. We always have like the call to action for the brand with the link and the code all above the fold for in a YouTube description. So it's clicks and it's conversions. Yeah. But the fun part about YouTube comes actually in the negotiation because unlike Instagram, there's just way more data that you can ask for to predict performance. You can predict a CPA and you can predict a ROAS with a YouTuber because. you can see how many views they're at their average views that they're generating because it's public information like you can compare their subscribers to their their generated views you can also ask for average watch time click-through rate um subscriber versus non-subscriber views and so all of those metrics help you do a qualitative and quantitative analysis on their channel it's my favorite youtube is my favorite like we're also i think we're that's a big rock for our influencer program this year is to get like penetrate youtube more we're all over instagram and tick tock i don't think we're in youtube enough what's like the do you do you recommend like integrations like like mid mid video and like what's the type of like content that you like to activate with influencers on youtube i know hex cloud you guys both the hex guide and you guys can have so much fun on youtube um because with both brands you don't necessarily like they're going to use the they're going to use the products in videos that you're not even sponsoring um it's going to be in the background they're going to be showing a day in the life they're going to be cooking with hex glad they're going to do a get ready with me with jones road like youtube youtubers are the best um but to answer your question youtube is almost like traditional media buying so i mentioned average watch time and that is a success metric so i mean youtubers are publishing 30, 45 minute videos nowadays, the average watch time is a retention metric. So you can see how long their viewers are on average watching and completing a video. And so that's a success metric for us. If someone has less than a 25% average watch time, we're not going to work with them because their viewers, 75% of the video is not being watched. Like no one cares what you're talking about. And that's, we always position an integration. within the average watch time. That's a contractual obligation. So if your average watch time, you have a 20 minute video, it's 15 minutes. You have to put your Hexclad, your Jones Road sponsorship within the 15 minutes that your audience is watching to optimize for the most views. And when I was at, I mean, it's nine, eight years ago when we were at Thrive Market, that was like the unboxing era of influencers where we would literally sponsor dedicated videos of them unboxing their Thrive Market order. Do not do that. No one cares. And I think YouTubers are not going to agree to a dedicated video anymore either. And they're also not going to have multiple sponsors within the same video. So you're booking an integration where the influencer is speaking to like two minutes about your brand, which is a lot longer than what you can get in a reel and an Instagram story. And so any brand I know can be successful on YouTube. But if you're also a brand that has. really differentiating talking points, like what makes Jones Road unique? What makes Hexclad unique? And really they can get into so much more messaging in a YouTube integration. So Seed was really successful on YouTube because there was so much to talk about that one singular skew at the time. So that's how I would, that's what you look for. That's how you book a YouTube video and you're always booking integrations. And you can also suggest If you're a little bit more sophisticated and you understand the YouTube influencer landscape a little bit more deeply, you can suggest titles as well. I want to make sure that I'm included in a vlog versus a day in the life. It is a little bit like Mediavine. So you don't like dedicated videos at all anymore in YouTube? You're all about the integration and having it be native to... Okay. How does that translate to an ad? Are you then saying like, hey, we also want... to be able to like cut the uh the integration and use that that specific like minute 6 30 to minute 8 45 like we get that footage and we can run that as an ad because you're not going to run like their whole video their whole 15 minute video right as an ad but like you want that clip you'll get the raw clip yep um i would say that i a lot of brands are afraid of youtube ads um i'm an influencer and as like a media channel um but i think that youtube should be a much bigger part of a brand's media mix not just influencer but also for for ads but the mta data looks bad yeah yeah no i'm i'm excited i mean we again we started we tried it with like agentio and stuff and it's just the performance wasn't there but so i'm excited that we're seeing some good performance youtube ads do very well for us um yeah so i'm excited really do yeah and i think uh I think, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, I think, value in it. I do think, again, it's still a performance channel, but I do think there is, and I've seen data on this, like it does drive brand metrics and brand health like really well because it is a longer form video where you're getting a much, you know, Conor McConnell talks about this a lot, but you're getting a much higher quality impression. You know, CPM is worth a lot more there when you're getting somebody to watch it for 30 minutes on a TV screen versus, you know, just scrolling by. All right, listeners, let's talk about the next couple of months. Holiday spending is naturally going to slow down, but sales volume can still remain high as you get through shipping cutoffs, as you get into the new year, and as you crush your Q1 targets. One of our focuses at Ridge will be squeezing more revenue from every customer that we've been acquiring for so long, and that is where After Sell by Rocked comes in. 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It's found money. so here's what you do go to aftersell.com operators right now activate rocked thanks or rock to pay plus and get the full aftersell suite for free run it check your numbers then you can come back and tell us if you want to turn it off but i already know what you're going to say what do you wish brands knew about influencer in general what do you think brands get wrong or when you're working with them or see or just what you see out there you're like i just wish that like everyone got this in 2026 almost Well, I think this conversation has been very exemplary that influencer is not one size fits all and that your initial perception of influencer will change. It is very rare that it's like influencers are going to do this for us. And then you start testing and it's, oh, wait, it's doing something else, but that's magical. So I would say from a. clicked up from a program perspective, it's not one size fits all. Your agency has to be customizing your proposals, your blueprints, your program. It has, you know, every brand is different. So every influencer program should be different too. And then I would also say from like an influencer marketer's perspective, I just stopped being so transactional. Like, I can't believe that I'm still saying that to this day, but yes, there's a transaction happening, but it's all about, the success of your program is the success of your relationships within that program which is inclusive of the talent managers which is inclusive of the talent and like we were talking about earlier it's it's just communicating frequently and often and transparently and um making sure that you're setting everybody up for success so um you know i think that as the creator economy as a whole it continues to explode um just being way being open and flexible that influencer may look differently for your brand than it does for your best friend's brand and so on and so forth. And just make sure that you have a team in-house, have an agency that can adapt and be fluid, that is staying on trend, whether it's in-house or an agency, also making sure that they are enabled with a software that will help them be successful as well. Cody, one of the things we've spent a lot of time thinking about is organic versus paid because for us like when we do organic influencer activations a lot of times they're centered around recipes and like that's not really the best content to run in a paid ad like there is some subtle some subtle shifts and i don't think that's necessarily the case for every single brand i think there are some brands where like the organic post can be native to that creator's uh content and the brand's content and it can be used as a paid ad but we're starting to really like i'm pushing our teams for every influencer deal to think through like like would this person work for organic yes or no would they work for paid yes or no just based on their style of content and if the answer is yes to both let's actually send them two different briefs let's let them do the thing that's organic let's let them do their thing that's more of a paid ad um and that's just for us because like a recipe is not going to necessarily be what we want to run in paid and then and then if the if the question becomes do we have to choose yes or no to use this person in both or one or the other it's like the default answer at least for us should be paid because we are a very paid media driven org and creator-led influencer-led ads work very well for us so we've been spending a lot of time in the last few months just like just kind of level setting on like when and like if we have to choose one we should choose paid if they're gonna work for both And we think that they have the content style for both and the budget for both. Like we should not be sending them one brief. We should be sending them an organic social brief. We should be sending them a paid media brief. So we've been just like kind of like fine tuning our thinking around it a little bit more. And I'm really excited to see how that plays into 26. I'm hoping that creators that we were only getting organic content from are now sending us great organic content that we're hopefully getting good impressions and CPMs on. we're also getting uh an iteration of that that's like more of a product oriented paid ad so that's been one of our our big shifts as we head into the new year yeah you're building more of a hybrid program and i would love more brands to think about their influencer program being more hybrid and being more cross-functional because like we were talking about earliest part of our conversation is just how cross-functional the seeds into the seed influencer program was um and you know making sure that your influencer team understands that like program all programs look different where these this is going to be my budget for organic influencer this is going to be my budget for more paid and you know growth influencer they're not going to look the same those programs are going to look very differently their briefs are going to be different um the way that you script them the way that you the s the actual deliverables that you book with them are going to be way different like for hex glad the organic is like how do you use HexSquad in your day-to-day life? There are influencers that can sell HexSquad in that way. There are other influencers that are going to create an amazing UGC ad for you. And you can ask them to also record two additional hooks and two additional CTAs. So one deliverable is actually six. And then if you've got an amazing video editing squad, those six videos can be 20, you know? So yeah, going back to just like think a little bit differently. like if someone sees if someone sees you know this person post like a a very organic to their content integration with our product visits our site and then a week later sees a bit more of a product focused ad from that same person like that's a fantastic experience right there that's a great that's a great like one two touch point versus they're getting sold the product right and unless it's like a bethany frankel right where like that is her organic style right like she's yeah every one in three or four posts is her like selling a product like unless that's the creator like you shouldn't try to like like square peg round hole and be like no we want you to sell our product and then post it in your your or your feed it's like no that's not native to their audience if anything that's manipulative to her audience because that's not the type of content that they're there for so i love like the one-two punch of organic native to their native to their their content they are posting and then in the ad account put more of an ad and i think that's like the best experience you could give that person's audience totally and i even think just like speaking to talent managers and talent directly it's not all about organic it's not like you we are also opening up new income streams for influencers and working with them in different capacities um like we want to work with you on an organic campaign but we also want to work with you on a ugc campaign instead of it being a one-off it's now two separate campaigns and we can analyze that influencers performance like if they perform well better organic than they do on paid we're just going to lean in organically like you are also that comes back to the relationship like you have to think there's Yes, benefits to the brand, but tremendous benefits to the influencer because they also learn about where their strengths are. Yeah. We've also been starting to think more like, how do we go to these influencers instead of saying, hey, we want to run ads from your page and positioning it more as, hey, we're going to potentially put six figures of media spend behind your handle. And that has huge benefits for your awareness and your follower count. And like, how do you. How do you position these whitelisting deals with creators? That's a little bit more of the lens of like, this is going to benefit you. Not just like, hey, we want to run ads from your page. Positioning is, I think, subtle but important here. I'm laughing because that conversation has never changed in the decade that I've been doing this. And my biggest wish is to understand the benefit of having a brand. basically boost your content as an ad is like you're going to get more followers more awareness and with that yes could come the occasional hate comment that is on the brand to delete figure out handle whatever um but i just think more and more agencies are open to it it's very rare that an influencer is like straight up no you can't do partnership ads with my content you can't and there's very few influencers that are like that um But because talent managers are picking up on that trend of brands wanting paid usage, they're charging an arm and a leg for it. And that is when I have to read them the script of what's the benefit to the benefits outweigh this fee you're charging me. And let me prove it to you in this scope of work. um we'll monitor how this influencers channel has grown and from from a basic like vanity metric like a follower like we'll be able to tell you how many new followers that you generated but you'll see that yourself um i do think that the issue can arise where an influencer has too many ads running from their handle um but you also don't want to be working with influencers like that because if they're taking way too many brand deals they're not going to be that no you don't want that do you have a sense of like what uh how do you model out like a ballpark influencer budget like do you feel like there's like a percent of your top line revenue that you can use or is that a percent of your total ad spend like do you do you have any um like mental models for i know it definitely changes per brand like i've heard some brands say like you should spend at least one percent of your top line revenue on on influencer which i think like if i think back to where hex clads put their budget like i think that's decent like that's probably how art as has trended like plus or minus a few basis points but do you have any mental models for that not i mean cody was actually the first brand that spoke to us about like two percent mnn you know i was like oh is that how people decide um two percent of your media mix right cody right yeah that's just what house has told me to to get like right accurate data in there Especially because with a channel like Influencer, there is a manual lift of getting that data into an MMM. It's not like an API. So it's like you're probably not going to have good data and not going to be worth it for less than that. Yeah, you got to send them like every Influencer post that's happening. That's crazy. I don't have a good answer for that. I know in my mind the budget minimums where we can have some fun, where we can actually start seeing some numbers. gauging success. And the sweet spot for us has been 50K minimum. We will be flexible and go lower than that for certain brands that we feel confident in that they're disrupting something. We're like, yeah, we can have some fun at 20K. But as the industry gets more competitive, as more and more brands are working with influencers, there has to be a minimum investment level in order for you to break through. competitors that are doing influencer already. All right, Lily, this has been great. Thank you so much. I learned, I know Connor did as well. Connor, you got any, like maybe one more question or anything else you want to get to? Honestly, this was awesome. I learned a ton. I got my wheels turning on how we should crush YouTube this year. You have your homework. Yeah. Oh, you guys would crush YouTube. I mean, like I can't, I also, by the way, my like entire Instagram is like food stuff. um it's just like what i engage with and like look up recipes i i barely make them i make a few but like obviously hex cloud is all over it right like so much seating and stuff like that but i feel like youtube you guys would crush you're just like i'm actually shocked i'm i'm actually shocked that you're not that we're it's not that we're not on youtube it's like we did a youtube sprint um in 2023 to get like our products like and we do have like we like prudent reviews for example is like a big youtuber cookware reviewer like we're very integrated with him so we are there i just like i think we need to go into 2026 and say hey we're gonna we're gonna put x percent of our because we're just like are the impressions we get in tiktok and instagram is massive but like youtube is definitely lacking and like youtube ads are are becoming a bigger and bigger and bigger part of our strategy we just ran a big holdout test and got a really really positive uh read on the incredibly fatality so i want to like we're going to keep spending on youtube And if we're going to keep spending paid on YouTube, I think we just need to continue to ramp up the organic influencer-led YouTube stuff. So that's kind of the guidelines I want to give to my team this year is like, here's our influencer budget. I want you to spend a minimum of this percent on YouTube, like go. So yeah, this has been really helpful to help kind of shape that thinking. So I appreciate it. All right, Lily, this was great. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. This was awesome. Where can people, what should people do? Where can people follow you or learn more about you? um you can find us on uh instagram on you know by super bloom.com or by super boom on most platforms it's by super bloom um and i love to talk about influencer um so you can also email me lily at by super bloom.com we are we're happy to chat it's my favorite thing to talk about all right thanks so much thanks so much All right, guys, that was a good one. Episode 92 with Lily from Superbloom. That was an awesome one. We love working with her. Obviously, you can tell why. She's super smart, super bright. So I could tell Connor Rowland was taking notes the whole time. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this. If you do, please share it. Share it, post it on X. Subscribe on podcasts, wherever you get it. Drop us a comment on YouTube. Tell us whatever you think. And again, as always, thank you so much to our sponsors. Motion, Rich Panel, Prescient AI, Aftersell, and Revo. We'll see you guys on the next one.

This week, we’re joined by Lily Comba, Founder & CEO of Superbloom, who opens up about how she got her start in influencer marketing and why she approaches influencer through a performance lens. Lily shares her journey from building in-house programs to launching Superbloom, and what she learned scaling influencer across some of the most recognizable consumer brands.

From there, we go deep on measurement, attribution, and negotiations. Lily breaks down how to think about ROAS, CPA, multipliers, and code leakage, along with how she models performance upfront to negotiate smarter creator deals and build paid usage rights and whitelisting into every partnership. We talk through practical frameworks for forecasting results, setting realistic KPIs, and holding influencer partnerships accountable without burning relationships.

We also dive into YouTube and channel expansion, including why YouTube is one of the most underrated influencer channels, how to negotiate effective integrations, and what longer-form creator content unlocks for both performance and brand lift. We wrap with how influencer fits into the broader media mix, common mistakes brands make when launching programs, and what operators should be focused on if they want to scale influencer the right way. If you’re trying to make influencer more measurable, negotiate better deals, and turn creator content into high-performing paid media, you’re gonna love this one.


If you have a question for the MOperators Hotline, click the link to be in with a chance of it being discussed on the show: https://forms.gle/1W7nKoNK5Zakm1Xv6


Chapters:
00:00:00 – Scaling Influencer Spend and Proving ROI
00:03:53 – Lily’s Background and Building Super Bloom
00:08:45 – From Seed Health to Launching an Agency
00:13:05 – Brands, Categories, and Who Influencer Marketing Works For
00:14:03 – Performance-First Influencer Programs and Service SKUs
00:19:31 – Organic Influencer KPIs vs Paid Performance Metrics
00:22:01 – Full-Funnel Impact, Halo Effects, and AOV Considerations
00:25:16 – Discount Code Leakage and Attribution Challenges
00:30:13 – Using Multipliers to Translate Influencer Performance
00:34:38 – Modeling ROAS, Click-Through Rates, and Incrementality
00:41:31 – Awareness vs Performance Across Different Brand Types
00:47:19 – Influencer Negotiation Frameworks and Deal Structuring
00:52:47 – High-AOV Products, Long Consideration Cycles, and Measurement Limits


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