Arlen:
Welcome to the eCommerce Marketing Podcast, everyone. My name is Arlen Robinson and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Tomer Hinn, who is the co-founder of Switch Supplements, as well as two other influencer-led DTC brands. With his expertise in influencer marketing, Tomer has helped numerous brands establish and maintain authentic relationships with influencers, with his Influencer Relationship Profits OS. Tomer has been listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and he’s the father of Milo, a 3-year old Golden Doodle. Welcome to the podcast, Tomer.

Tomer Hen:
Thank you Arlen, thanks for having me.

Arlen:
Yes, no problem. And thank you for joining us. You know, really super excited to talk to you because we’re talking about a subject today that is kind of near and dear to my heart. And being the co-founder of OSI Affiliate Software, you know, we’re huge advocates for affiliate and influencer marketing. And today, you’re going to be enlightening us on micro-influencers, what they are, and how an e-commerce brand can take advantage of micro-influencers. So really excited to. to talk to you about that and to see what you can bring to that subject. But before we do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

Tomer Hen:
Yeah, sure. So in a nutshell, I, I’ve been a digital marketer ever since I remember. Um, I think that from middle, like before high school, right. The, for sure. Um, and that was my only job since then. And I founded Modco 11 years ago, which is a company that does. Marketing for apps, big brands like L’Oreal, McDonald’s, Amazon, Audible. And then in the last three years, I. really wanted to focus on working with the founders themselves, being an entrepreneur, and a solopreneur, and a brand founder. I really wanted to work directly with other founders and help them grow their business, versus working with all those Fortune 500 companies. And this is why I got into e-commerce. So first, I wanted to launch my own brand. I launched a supplement brand that is made for entrepreneurs. And this was the first step that I had into e-commerce. Actually, I also sold on eBay. And that’s fine because someone else reminded me of this, but I sold items on eBay when I was, I think, 13 or 12. And I think that’s where I kind of had this excitement for e-commerce, but I only got back.

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
to it a few years ago. So

Arlen:
Gotcha.

Tomer Hen:
anyway, so I had this supplement company and we built the entire infrastructure of how we can… grow this company, while I can say in visionary mode, in product development mode. And we just realized that we can use the same infrastructure that we built for our supplement company to help other brands as well. And moreover, like going through different phases, we decided that we are going to focus on scaling brands with influencer relationships, because this is the one thing that we saw that really had tremendous contribution to the growth of our supplement brand. And then I partnered up with my now business partner, Ryan Moran, and we now own Switch Supplements, which is again, is a supplement brand made for entrepreneurs, help them sleep better and feel better throughout the day. And

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
one of our core strategies is using micro-influencers in order to get more social proof, to get more organic sales and never worrying about… creatives. So we work with a bunch of influencers who always create content for us. And that’s super fun. So I think there’s so much noise out there when it comes to influencer marketing. And there are so many buzzwords that people and brand founders hear on YouTube and podcasts and all of that. And this is why I’m so passionate being on podcasts and talking about… the real way, in my opinion, to build long lasting relationships, which most

Arlen:
Thanks for watching.

Tomer Hen:
brands are treating influencers as a marketing channel and trying to extract

Arlen:
Mm.

Tomer Hen:
something out of it. And this is why most of them are losing money. And I believe that many of the listeners today would, I would say that probably 50% of them have tried working with influencers in the past and

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
it was either not scalable or… they just lost so much money because influencers overcharged for shout outs, et cetera, or they had really good success, but it wasn’t like very occasionally, like every once in a while. So

Arlen:
Right, right.

Tomer Hen:
yeah, really passionate about just helping founders systemizing, building long lasting relationships.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, and I love the fact that you kind of, you know, took some real world experience that you had with the influencers and are able to apply that to helping other businesses, which is, it’s always a great thing, you know, because you kind of came from the school of hard knocks. I’m sure you learned a lot, had a lot of lessons learned that you can then apply, you know, to what you’re doing and be able to craft, you know, a more kind of concise action plan, if you will, for… brands to be able to follow because like you said, there’s a lot of noise out there, especially under the whole term, you know, influencers, you know, there’s so much out there. A lot of times it’s hard to know where to begin. So yeah, that’s great.

Tomer Hen:
Yeah, exactly.

Arlen:
Well, speaking of influencers, yeah, exactly. So yeah, so speaking of influencers, really where I wanna begin is if you can just explain just the concept of micro influencers and why they’re so important for e-commerce brands today.

Tomer Hen:
Yeah, so I think that if we stick to the terms and buzzwords and terminology of micro-influencers or macro-influencers, I think that people are missing the point. So I think that the real question

Arlen:
Hmm.

Tomer Hen:
is, what is the value of working with influencers as a whole? And then what would be the best strategy that fits? my specific brand because every brand has to work with different types of influencers and they can work on different strategies. But I think that for most brands that I would say that are below $10 million in revenue and want to grow to eight figures and beyond, working with… So before I touch on micro influencers, we all know that we wear or we will be influenced… by someone to buy a product or service. It could be a friend, it could be someone on social media, it could be a celebrity, whoever it is. And we trust those people more than we trust a very polished ad on Facebook that we just stumbled upon. And

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
this is the core that we need to remember. And obviously consumers are way more sophisticated nowadays and they don’t trust that every post by an influencer is an authentic and genuine recommendation for a product because they know how this business works. They know that they got paid. Just like seeing a commercial TV, you don’t expect that everyone who just got paid to be on TV will actually recommend this product. So

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
given those two facts, this is why so many brands are going into working with, they really wanna work with influencers. And more influencers are getting more brand deals. And this is why they call the shout out inflation, where

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
so many brands are reaching out to influencers, so they just inflate their prices up

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
to a point where it doesn’t make sense for a brand to pay that much if they really want to see a positive return on investment. I’m not talking about branding and if you just want brand exposure, that’s fine. Although there are better ways to do that. But if you want to get a dollar in and want to see at least $2 out, just paying for shout outs would probably not be the best strategy for you. Now,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
if you’re looking at micro influencers, and the definition for micro influencers is very, very vague, like there is no official term for it, but we’re talking

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
about relatively small influencers. Most of

Arlen:
Yep.

Tomer Hen:
the time we refer to influencers who have less than 100K followers, sometimes even less than 50,000 followers, but that’s about the range. And… when we work with those types of influencers, it’s very, it is easier to get access to their attention. It’s easier to get access to their excitement about working with you. And they’re more flexible with the rates. And when I say rates, I still stick to our number one rule of thumb in the company. And we’ve learned this the hard way, trust me, because it costs us a lot of money, that we do not negotiate with influencers.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
And it’s harder. to not negotiate if you’re reaching out to Kim Kardashian. 

Arlen:
You’d Right.

Tomer Hen:
probably have to negotiate or you have to accept whatever they ask, whatever she

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
asked. But if you are working with a bunch of micro influencers, you might have more leverage than you think. And this

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
is where relationship building comes into play. And I can tell you that the same strategy applies for macro influencers and bigger influencers. If we’re looking at the basic human relationship and interaction kind of science and rules. We know that by leading with value, by leading with a give and not showing that you are looking to get something out of the person in front of you in every relation, in every relationship out there, this is the way to build long lasting relationships that actually provides value for both sides.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
So it’s just easier to do that with an influencer who is just starting out, they have 50,000 or 100,000 followers, and they are very hungry to show that they deliver results for themselves. They really want to create an extra income. They want to create great content for their audience.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
They love getting free stuff, and they’re not getting 500 messages every day from different brands

Arlen:
Never.

Tomer Hen:
offering them to get money for it. So this is why you have the opportunity as a brand founder to create a meaningful relationship with them.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
And what I is that the perceived value of, for example, a product, a free product that you send to an influencer is way higher than what it costs you.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
So if you pay $500 to an influencer, it is worth $500 to you and it is worth $500 for them. If you send them a product that is valued at $100 and you send them the same product every month for six months,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
you just send them a $600 value. of goods, but it probably only costs you 150

Arlen:
Right, exactly.

Tomer Hen:
if that. So this is why you have a huge leverage when it comes

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
to sending out products that cost more than it costs you to make them. And it’s the same

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
for applications, it’s the same for SaaS companies, it’s the same for service-based businesses. But if we’re focusing on e-commerce brand, this is a huge leverage because the

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
physical gift has a very, very high value and tangible value.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, for

Tomer Hen:
Now

Arlen:
sure.

Tomer Hen:
the, yeah.

Arlen:
No, I was just going to say, I’m glad you broke it down like that because a lot of times when brands are thinking about, all right, how do you monetize this? How do you incentivize them? You’re right. There is a lot. There’s a lot of value there because like you said, that particular product that may cost the consumer $600 only costs you $150. You have that profit margin built in there. So if you’re offering that to a… Influencer, yeah, it’s going to speak more volume than you think because of that that really value that they see on there But you know for you,

Tomer Hen:
Yeah.

Arlen:
it’s not really costing you that much

Tomer Hen:
Yeah. You know, I just had a call yesterday with a $25 million supplement brand. They’re a protein brand,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
really cool brand, and they hired me to help them grow their in-house influencer and ambassador program. So we had a call yesterday and they asked me, after you just saw really good success with their in-house program, They asked me, do you think that still seeding, which is the strategy that we talked about, like sending free products, not expecting anything in return is more valuable than just going out there and pay someone whatever amount of money in order to get access to their content. And we just broke it down and said, if you’re spending a thousand dollars on a shout out by one influencer or $500 times two, with two influencers, or you break down those $1,000 and you send 40. packages to influencer to 40 different influencers, even though they are smaller.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
The compound value that you will get if you nurture those relationships correctly is so much higher than getting a sponsored, paid, polished, and scripted video from an influencer that it’s very easy to sense in the first three seconds of the video that they really like your money and not necessarily your product.

Arlen:
Right,

Tomer Hen:
While

Arlen:
right.

Tomer Hen:
When we use what we call the seeding strategy, which means that we never pay influencers and we never even ask them to post about us in exchange for a free product. We

Arlen:
Hmm.

Tomer Hen:
always lead with value. And when

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
we lead with just to give, we are now different than 99% of the brands who sending DMs and emails to those influencers because they are used. to brands sending them mass reach out and say, hey, would

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
you promote me for a product, for this product? And they

Arlen:
Mm.

Tomer Hen:
never heard about your product. This product costs $25. And

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
you ask them to vouch for a product and commit to that, to their audience that they’ve built for the last five years

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
before they even tried it, right? Unless you’re a super well-known brand that they already buy, that would be happy to do that. But if you’re not, and they

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
never heard about you, they would probably not do that. And

Arlen:
No.

Tomer Hen:

I’ve seen so many times that… We got access to influencers with over half a million followers and

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
they posted about us more than once, but they would never have done this if we were to ask them to post about us in exchange or by conditioning their posts to get a free product.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
They did it because they accepted our gift and they really loved it and we kept great communication with them for two weeks. And…

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
then they posted about us. These posts, if we were

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
to get their rate card, it would probably be, could be $3,000 at least. And this is a true value of building long lasting relationships versus trying to just to get access by paying for shout outs or asking them for something in return for your 30, 40, $50 product.

Arlen:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting strategy. I hadn’t really heard of a strategy like that, the seating strategy, like you said, where you’re not asking them anything. You’re not asking them to post, you’re providing them with a great product. You’re just running with it. You’re still building the relationship. Probably, you know, I’m sure communicating with them about the product, asking them where they have questions and then kind of leave it on their end. And then of course, naturally that seems like that’s really more of an organic type of relationship where they’ll use it, if they really love it, they’ll share it in their day to day, uh, posting their blogs, their videos and things like that. So yeah, really, really awesome strategy. Now as far as these micro influencers are concerned, you know, there’s really a big pool of them, um, that are out there that, you know, probably fit that category. You said like less than a hundred K followers for a brand, you know, any brand, any given brand, how do they really kind of narrow it down and find the right ones that they’re going to approach? you know, maybe send them the product and then kind of go from there. What’s what is the best strategy from narrowing it down?

Tomer Hen:
Yeah, great question. I think this is the number one question that I’m getting. 

Arlen:
Um, Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
it’s a bit different wording. The question is way more specific, like what platform do you use to find the influencers and I can tell you that

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
we have tried every single platform out there. 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
Right. And I always check out new platforms, always get very open-minded to try them out. But to be honest, most of them are overpriced and under-delivered. And the reason in the sentence is that the different platforms like Instagram and TikTok, they just limit the access to their data, to those third party platforms, and they want to keep everything to their own. 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
So this is why usually you just don’t get the results that you think that you will get. Now, the best way really to look for influencers is doing manual research. The algorithms of TikTok and Instagram and YouTube are so good that you really don’t have to pay… any other platform to find really good influencers. 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
I mean, nowadays you can go on YouTube, you never have to search for anything. They already show you all of the content that is relevant for you based on what they know from other users. 

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
So that applies the same for influencers. So if you go to, let’s say one potential influencer that you would love to work with, and you hit that button that says suggested accounts or similar accounts. you will find so many other influencers who have the same or similar audience, similar content, and that these influencers’ followers are following them or liking their content, engaging with their content, et cetera. And if you just have a list of five influencers that you would wish to work with, and I’m sure that every brand founder can come up with it, you can have thousands and thousands of influencers that you find through those suggested account.

Arlen:
Mm hmm.

Tomer Hen:
through this suggested account feature. 

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
Now, to your direct question on how do you, which I think is a way more important question, on how do you vet those influencers? It’s not about just the technical aspect of how to find them or what tool should I use. It’s more about how do I vet and decide whether they’re right or wrong for my brand.

Arlen:

Right.

Tomer Hen:
So obviously, I wouldn’t go too deep into talking about engagement rates and buying followers and all of that. I think that most of our listeners are aware that If you see an account with a hundred thousand followers and they get five likes on every post, they probably bought their followers.

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
The little hack that you could use is to check the number of comments, because it’s also

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
nowadays more accounts are being more sophisticated, so they buy likes, and

Arlen:
Yeah,

Tomer Hen:
it’s very hard to fake comments. 

Arlen:
Exactly.

Tomer Hen:
So if you see a healthy number of comments on every post, that gives you a good signal. But…

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
I think the number one factor is the relevancy to your brand. And when I’m speaking about relevancy, it’s obviously the question of, do I, would I be proud if that influencer vouch for my brand?

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
Do I think that they would genuinely enjoy my product if they were to stumble upon an ad and, or go into a retail store and buy my product, would they enjoy it? And if so, would I be happy if they would create a testimonial for me? 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
So that’s number one question that you can ask yourself. And usually, if you’re a brand founder or just someone that works within the brand team, or if you have any guidelines that you can show someone, and you can do that by just vetting 10 influencer and say, this is why I think this is a good one, this is why it’s not. it’s very easy to communicate. 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
Now, So that’s the other part, and this is also a little hack that we use, is especially when you don’t want to pay influencers for posting, you need to make sure that they are creating content that shares about their life, about products they use, about their routines, about what they wear, what they eat, what they drink all of that.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
So we all know there’s day in my life kind of videos and morning routines and evening routines and this is what I ate for lunch and all of that.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
If this is a promotional account that only promotes themselves or their business or they only provide information versus sharing their own personal lives, most chances that even if they will accept your free gift, they will not create any content about it, right? Unless you pay them huge amount of money.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
But the influencers who always share about their lives. They’re looking for more content to create. They’re looking to share about this cool product that they just found out about, or this cool new, or this delicious cookie that they just received in mail, or whatever it is that you’re selling.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
And if you see that they have a lot of stories, if they share about it live, this is a good opportunity for you to reach out to them, because they will be very open to post about you if your product is good.

Arlen:
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Those are some great ways to, to narrow down. And then that’s exactly what I usually tell people all the time when I’m speaking to brands about influencer marketing, specifically mark, micro influencers, you want to, you want to find those people where you see that true genuine engagement, where they’ve opened up their lives. That’s, those are the things that are compelling, you know, to consumers and people that are looking at this content and absorbing it. Now you mentioned kind of earlier, you know, this, this whole kind of concept of influencers, it’s just pretty broad. It’s really like wide open. Um, and you talked about, you know, some of these mega, mega influencers, like the Kim Kardashians of the world. Um, a lot of people naturally as a brand tend to naturally kind of be a little bit biased and think that, Oh, um, why, why would I go for these smaller, you know, influences that have a smaller fall and why don’t I shoot for, you know, if I have the budgets, if I have the, you know, um, marketing resources to go for these mega influencers, why don’t I just go that route? Why would you say, you know, micro influencers are still, there’s more advantages going that route as opposed to these more prominent ones.

Tomer Hen:
Yep. Yeah. Great question. So it’s kind of like saying, if I have the budget, why would I buy an ad on a local newspaper or on Forbes,  Right.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
if I’m speaking to entrepreneurs, for example, versus

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
the New York Times? I can just advertise in New York Times.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
Why would I narrow myself down? And the reason is,

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
the smaller the audience, and we know this for fact for most marketing the more relevant, targeted and engaged they are. The bigger

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
the audience, you know, Kim Kardashian, I don’t know how many followers, probably over a hundred million I’m saying.

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
And, you know, obviously there are so many people who follow the Kim Kardashians of the world. But

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
if you have an influencer who talks about supplements for golf playing dads, right?

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
Or nutrition or health. related issues for soccer playing men over 35, for example.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
If you have a brand that sells supplements for golf players over the age of 35, and I’m giving this as an example because I’ve worked with one in a similar niche, not golf, but similar niche.

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
And obviously, even if they have 50,000 followers, if this influencer has 50,000 followers, would probably get better results. than going to Kim Kardashian and promote it, or going to David Beckham and promote it. Because

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
it’s just not relevant. They have bigger audience, but it’s just not relevant. But when someone follows someone because of their very specific content, because they trust what they have to say about that specific topic,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
then they buy. And if you are looking to show off your… And I’m not kidding. Like, I’ve seen this over and over. Brands who are just, you know, they just like showing off that they’ve used this influencer and you know, it boosts their ego, it looks well on the website, fine. But if you’re looking to create sales and have a sustainable source of customer acquisition channel, so you better go to the micro nano influencer way. And if you have the budget, so

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
just work with a bunch of them.

Arlen:
Yeah,

Tomer Hen:
Don’t just

Arlen:
that make.

Tomer Hen:
put all your eggs in one basket.

Arlen:
Yeah, I totally follow that. That makes a lot of sense. It’s just that the targeting aspect of these micro influencers is what is the key thing. Because obviously, when you’re selling a product and you have a brand, you know, you’re in order to, of course, differentiate your brand amongst your competitors. You’ve got a kind of a niche features, niche aspects of your product that then can kind of be in more alignment with these individual influencers. Like you said. the supplements for golfers over 35, something like that. That’s

Tomer Hen:
Yeah.

Arlen:
a specific demographic.

Tomer Hen:
Yeah.

Arlen:
And then that’d be more in line with an actual influencer.

Tomer Hen:
Yeah.

Arlen:
Now,

Tomer Hen:
And also

Arlen:
with these

Tomer Hen:
there

Arlen:
influencers,

Tomer Hen:
is,

Arlen:
let’s…

Tomer Hen:
I just want to share one little anecdote that I think is very important to understand. The compound value of working with a bunch of micro influencers who talk about you is way greater than just one mega influencer who will post about you once. And

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
then people, oh yeah, that’s cool. Kim Kardashian is talking about this brand.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
Tomorrow I probably forget it. But

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
if I work with 20 micro influencers…

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
And again, I follow most of them because this is my thing, right? I’m a golf playing dad or whatever. And I follow all the influencers in the space and I see three of them posting about the same product that they like in a course of a month.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
This would convince me to go out there and buy it way more than just seeing this random post by this huge influencer and because I’ll probably forget it the day after.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
But if you have the ability to work with more influencers, you get this compound value of more and more and more social proof. It seems like

Arlen:
Alright.

Tomer Hen:
everybody’s talking about your product, when in reality,

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
because you’re so niche, you only work with five or 10.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
And it seems like everybody’s talking about you.

Arlen:
Yeah, I see that makes sense for sure, for sure. That compound effect. Now, let’s say you are working with, you know, five or 10 different micro influencers and, you know, obviously, you’re on the on your side of the brand, you’re kind of evaluating their performance. What would you say are ways and how do you really measure the success of all of the ROI of these micro And then, you know, what metrics do you find useful, most useful for evaluating their performance?

Tomer Hen:
Yeah, I think that’s also one of the most common questions that I get. And I think it’s super important because I’m coming from performance marketing. It took me a while to change my mindset and have this balance between performance marketing and brand marketing or brand awareness.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
So. And so I always find a way, I always try to find a way to measure the results we are getting. And it’s so hard to do that when you’re talking about influencer relationships that you don’t have a way for them to click directly from the post to your store, track all of that, no pixels, no cookies, no any of that. So

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
we came up with a few ways that you can measure the success of your influencer relationships. And there are two things that you’re getting out of. building relationships with influencers. One, you get a bunch of content from them. So if you send your product to 100 influencers and then 30 posts about you, which is the average that we see, 20 to 30 posts about you, you have, and you can generate 60 to 100 pieces of content if you just iterate them, mesh them up together, re-edit their content. You can have out of 30 pieces of content, you can have about 100 pieces of content that you can create, and then you can use it as ads. You don’t have to worry about hiring a creative agency. You don’t have to worry about ad fatigue, all of that. And that’s a

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
huge value on its own because many brands are going out there and buying UGC videos from creators and all these platforms or going to those studios and photo shoots and all of that. And that has a very large monetary value. And those

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
ads will then outperform most of your ads that you can come up in a studio, probably. That’s

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
one thing. And then it doesn’t have to do… It doesn’t have to do anything with how many followers those influencers have. The other point is the organic reach that you are getting out of the influencers, which means that when they post about you, they have all of their followers potentially viewing your content. Obviously, you would not get all of them. The average is about 10% across the board, roughly between TikTok and Instagram. Really various, but it’s anything between seven to 15%. So the average is around 10. So you can back calculate and say, okay, if this influencer has got a hundred thousand followers and he posted about me twice, which means that every post got an average of about 10,000 views, which means that I got from that relationship, from this sending a free product, I got 20,000 people who viewed my product and someone recommending my product. Obviously,

Arlen:
Hmm.

Tomer Hen:
if they tag you, which they mostly do, they will check your… social pages, they will check your website and some of them will convert into customers. But you can’t really track that directly. So what we do is we track the media value, the average media value of those, for example, 20,000 views that we get from that influencer. We calculated based on the average prices of Instagram. I don’t want to go too deep on that, but that’s one of the ways that we track the compound effect of influencer relationships from a monetary perspective. influencers who are promoting with a referral code or commission code. And then you can easily track how many sales you got through their links. 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
But the reality is, and that’s the beauty of it, when we use the sitting strategy, most of the influencers will actually post about you without even sharing their discount code. They will

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
just say, I got this product. I really recommend you go check it out. Why?

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
Because they don’t care about making another a hundred dollars, 200 dollars, whatever it is

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
with your commission. They care about getting creating. authentic content for their viewers. And it will be way more authentic if they post about it without a discount code. So from us, the challenge is that we are not able to track how many sales they’re sending us. But the benefit is that we don’t pay any commissions. We don’t pay any of that.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
So the way to track it is just by the number of views that you are getting for this content. And

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
of course, month over month, just track the number of organic conversions that you are getting since you started influencer program. And we’ve seen this across the board with all of the brands we work with. New products that they launched received zero sales, launching

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
an influencer program, zero ads, and suddenly they see organic sales coming through the store. Amazon listings that had zero reviews are just getting sales after influencers posted about those products. So it always happens that you have to be more aware of it. And now the last piece that is, I think it is the most important part of influencer relationships. We talked about the content that you’re receiving from influencers. The best way to measure the success of your influencer relationships is to measure the success of their content when you’ve used it in your ad campaigns. Which

Arlen:
Mm.

Tomer Hen:
means that if you had a campaign that generated… ROAS of X, and now you have 10 creatives that you received from influencers, and now you double your ROAS, that’s how you can calculate the true value of working with those influencers and their effect on your bottom line. Because you just doubled, and we see this over and over. One creative can double and triple the average ROAS that you were seeing on your ad campaign. So if you can just be depending on that or be… being fed by those influencers and always have a constant stream of content, this is how you can really, really scale up your influencers company. Because you know

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
that one creative, even if it got 2000 views on this influencer profile, but

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Tomer Hen:
you now run it as an ad for five months and it generated four X rows while all of your other creatives are generating 0.8, this is the true value of working with influencers.

Arlen:
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Definitely well said. And, you know, I think, like you said, it’s very important that you have those other ways of tracking this because these days, like you said, in that seeding method, you’re gonna have these influencers that are just, they’re talking about it, they’re not using a promo code, they wanna seem more genuine and not just so salesy that they’re just pushing these products. They’re just showing the products that they’re using in their day-to-day life, not using any codes, not linking to your site. And so, yeah, you really just have to keep an eye out on, like you said, the views of these campaigns, make sure you’re tagged in all of their posts that they do. And then that’s a great way to measure it. So that’s really awesome. And this step really, I think, sums up everything because the bottom line is once you’re able to see the success of these different influencers, then you’ll know. which ones that you want to continue the relationships with, or should you just kind of move on and find other ones? So I think that’s really what it’s going to come down to. Well, Tomer, this has been an awesome conversation. I mean, I think I can talk about influencer marketing for like hours and hours because this subject is, it’s so near and dear to my heart, and it’s really a hot topic today. And I think it will be for the foreseeable future for sure. So I know our listeners and viewers have learned a lot from this conversation, but I always like to switch gears on my final question just to close things out. So our audience gets to know you a little bit better if you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact that you think we’d be interested to know.

Tomer Hen:
Hmm. Um, so I think that is what many people are surprised when they hear about me is that I used to be a electronic music producer

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
and that was like kind of my thing for

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
two and a half years, three years.

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
And I was like all into that. Uh,

Arlen:
Wow.

Tomer Hen:
after I like got back from our office, I just like locked myself in the room and until midnight, I just like wouldn’t stop making music

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
and it was a lot of fun. Uh,

Arlen:
Yeah.

Tomer Hen:
but I realized that. If, like this is where I need to make a decision of if I want to take this seriously, that’s probably the only thing that I will have to do. And that

Arlen:
Hmm?

Tomer Hen:
will come in conjunction with my other passion, which is marketing and business.

Arlen:
Right.

Tomer Hen:
So I chose that, but I always have this little place in my heart for

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
electronic music production. So I might go

Arlen:
Okay,

Tomer Hen:
back there.

Arlen:
yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, you definitely can always be a backup. It’s always something that you can do on the side or just for fun or, you know,

Tomer Hen:
Yeah. Yeah.

Arlen:
working with up and coming artists that are trying to get into it. So yeah, great stuff. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. We appreciate that. Lastly, before we do let you go, if you don’t mind sharing the best way for our listeners and viewers to contact you if they want to pick your brand anymore about micro influencers.

Tomer Hen:
Yeah, sure. Always happy to chat with other red founders, bounce off some ideas, getting you advice on whatever it is that you’d like in terms of your brand scale. So I’m very active on Twitter the last few months. So feel free to just, I’ll provide a link, I guess, in the show notes. LinkedIn as well. So Twitter and LinkedIn are a great way to just, feel free to just DM me. I promise that. I just checked this personally. And the other

Arlen:
Okay.

Tomer Hen:
way is I’d love to provide you with a free resource, which I think will be very helpful to just implement everything that we just shared. If you go to influencers checklist.com, influencers checklist.com, you will see, you will be able to download our daily, weekly and bi-weekly checklist that we follow every day with our brands and the brands that we help. to grow our business and scale our business with InfantSource relationships. 

Arlen:
Okay, great.

Tomer Hen:
It’s very very actionable. So you have a lot of resources. And we just go deeper into everything that I just shared. It’s a completely free resource. So just feel free to just go to InfantSourceChecklist.com and get your copy. And if you have

Arlen:
Okay,

Tomer Hen:
any questions,

Arlen:
great.

Tomer Hen:
just reach out on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Arlen:
All right, that’s awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. We always appreciate those guests that offering actionable resources for our listeners and viewers. So we’ll be sure to have the link to that in our show notes and on the website as well. Well, again, it’s been awesome talking to you, Tamer. We really appreciate you coming on the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Tomer Hen:
Thank you, Arlen.

Arlen:
Thank you.

Podcast Guest Info

Tomer Hen
Co-founder of Switch Supplements