Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimise your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, hosting, as usual, and today we've got something quite new for you, after 200 episodes and more of just me talking. Basically, apart from the odd time when I've shared episodes, I've been on this is the first time I've actually got a guest on the podcast, and this is a guy called Mark Callander. He's an influencer marketing specialist and, yeah, this was a great chat that I had with Mark.

Speaker 1: 1:43

We discussed all things influencer marketing, because obviously, seo and influencer marketing are related, because it's just another channel for getting people to be aware of your brand, to be aware of your products, using influencers to help share your message.

Speaker 1: 1:55

Because, more and more, especially with the younger generations, like my teenage daughters, they're using things like TikTok and Instagram as search engines now, so this is something that's really important to be aware of. Even if it's not something you use necessarily yourself right away, I think it's really important to be aware of. So, without further ado, let's get into the chat with Mark. So here I am today with Mark Killander, and he is a influencer marketing specialist, and I've invited him on the podcast today because I'm really interested in learning more about influencer marketing, because it's not something I'm massively familiar with or I've ever really used. It's something we obviously considered, so I'm interested to see what Mark can teach us all today, what we can learn from him. So yeah, mark, if you'd just like to introduce yourself to the audience and, you know, take us where you want to go with it.

Speaker 2: 2:40

Thank you very much and thank you for having me. So, as you said, my name is Mark Inander and I've been working with sales and marketing for over 16 years, and what I believe is that I've been through all the different trends during the years. You know things happen and how can we use marketing in different ways, so my plan here today is to go through the basic on what you need to think about and how we can get started in a very easy way, because, if we look at, I'm extremely data-driven, so I love the numbers, and what we can see is that 92% of all the people trust influencer more than traditional marketing, and that's a pretty amazing high number. So then we can ask ourselves why aren't more people doing this if we are able to get still much more trust?

Speaker 1: 3:43

Okay, yeah, I mean that makes sense. I mean, I've obviously seen influence marketing in action, you know, with other brands using it. But then when I'm looking at keywords people use, obviously we've never used it. And I think probably the biggest question question, the first question I've got is what? What do you? What do you do if you want to get started with influencer marketing? What are your starting points? I mean, for me it's obviously thinking. I'd be thinking how do I find the right influencers?

Speaker 2: 4:08

because obviously there's influencers and there's influencers they have to have, I assume, the right audience that would connect with your audience, and that's a good way, because a lot of people say, as to you, we need to find the right influencer, but first you need to understand your own audience, the same as you do with all the other marketing activities you do today. You, you decide which audience you want to reach, but normally, normally when you think, okay, influence marketing, we need to find the right influencers, but first figure out your audience, and out there there's a lot of different platforms where you can actually scout, which means that if you know exactly which type of person you want to reach, you can easily filter that and get all that information and then you can decide which influencer you actually want to work with. So first of all, you need to understand your audience, as always, type that in and then you can choose the influencer that suits your audience the best.

Speaker 1: 5:15

Okay, so where do we find these platforms? Are these like? Are these well, well known ones? I've got no idea here.

Speaker 2: 5:20

Basically, there are a lot so, and they are different level of them. There are a lot of scouting tools out there and those mean that you can easily just find the influencers, but then you also have platforms that can do the whole process for you, which mean when you scout person, you can easily reach out to them. You get an estimate fee what they normally charge for that collaboration, and then, of course, in the end you get all the data.

Speaker 1: 5:52

And so what kind of data would you get on it? So if you were scouting for a particular influencer, and so what kind of data would you get on it? So if you were scouting for, like, a particular influencer, what kind of data points should you be looking at when trying to choose an influencer? So, obviously, if you think they've got the right audience, that's one data point. But then what are the other kind of variables that you should be taking into consideration when trying to pick the ones to make?

Speaker 2: 6:11

first, approaches to, and the most important, I believe is the engagement rate. Most important, I believe, is the engagement rate, and with that means how much they engage with the influencer in their post, stories, whatever. So I believe that one is extremely important because then you know they have a good relationship with their followers right.

Speaker 1: 6:31

So that's not. Obviously it says this get around the problem where some influence. Well, I've heard stories where some influencers will kind of artificially inflate their follower numbers. They might be buying followers and that kind of thing on various platforms, so it looks like they might be better than they are. So is following the engagement rate a way of kind of cutting out those people that might be over-inflating?

Speaker 2: 6:52

Actually not because in most of the platform for example, since where I worked before you get the followers and then you can see if there are suspicious accounts. You can see if there are real followers, influencer followers.

Speaker 2: 7:11

So the good thing with the platform is that you can see that directly and then afterwards you can also see the engagement level, so you can easily filter that directly and see okay, does this make sense to work with them or not, Because nowadays you can't work with someone that buys their followers work with someone that buys their followers right so that.

Speaker 1: 7:39

So so these, these sort of the platforms, help you avoid that issue of basically, yeah, people were ripping you off. Essentially also, you're sort of overcharging for what their actual real reach is. Okay, that's really good to know. Um, so if you're looking at working with an influencer, what's the typical kind of model that they'll work on? Is it like a flat fee for certain pieces of content that they'll produce for their audience? Or do any of them work on like a cpa cost per acquisition deal, where the more they perform for you, the more you pay them? What's the kind of typical ways of that monetization and that kind of like?

Speaker 2: 8:14

the normal way, it's a that you pay a fee for the production that they do, and that because that's the easiest way of doing it, and that also depending on how big they are, and because a lot of people love to work with their smaller influencers, because maybe, if they are a retail or e-commerce, they can send out product instead of paying them, and what is good also with a platform, then, is that you can understand, okay, how much product should they have, depending on what level they are, and that is calculated on CPM, of course.

Speaker 1: 8:54

Yeah, okay, right. On a cpm mock course. Yeah, yeah, okay, right. So so a lot. If you've got like a physical product or um an online product, you can actually just essentially just give them the free product in turn in in return for them creating content depending on the size of the influencers.

Speaker 1: 9:10

right, okay, and what? What? So if you were say, um, you're an e-commerce brand, say, let's take beauty as an example. So let's say you're a makeup brand or something like a small makeup brand, like you know, not a big conglomerate, but you're like a small brand and you're trying to get noticed and you find these influencers who will just do it in return for products, without payment. What kind of you know what kind of numbers of reach would you be expecting that level of influencer to get to? So say, your product is worth maybe sort of £40, $40. How much for every one of them you give out how much to an influencer? How much reach would you expect to get from that? Is there kind of like an idea?

Speaker 2: 9:58

of how far it goes. It all depends, uh, because the numbers it's hard to understand depending on the content, uh, that the creator do. But I would say, if they have less than 10 000 followers, and you know that, you will get somewhere between 10 000 views, um, but right, it's all. Because one problem I believe a lot of people are doing in influence marketing is that, hey, you, you need to do this video, you have all these the guidelines and you need to be like this than this, and it doesn't work like that because you need to. Also, if you want to collaborate with an influencer, you need to let them be creative, because we don't know, no one knows which post is going to be viral, and that is that the influencer does this as work. So you need to let them be like they are, because if you try to say to them, you need to follow this script, it won't work right.

Speaker 1: 11:03

So you're basically saying don't be prescriptive to people. So if you're going to work with influencers, your very best thing is to just literally let them get on with it, because they know their audience, they know what works for their audience. If you, if you're over prescript, then you might end up negating it Kind of the benefits. They're not going to make the best videos, surely, but is there maybe some things you might want to prescribe at a certain level? So, like you might say, don't mention another particular big competitor you don't want them to mention.

Speaker 1: 11:37

So it's okay to set certain guidelines around certain things you don't want them to say potentially, but I suppose you don't want. You don't want them to say this is the exact format, this is the exact script. You can sort of say think that's better, don't do this.

Speaker 2: 11:51

But advise you to do whatever you want, because because then you will see.

Speaker 2: 11:56

And what we have seen I believe more this year is that first of all, influencer marketing was more nice to have, but nowadays it's going to be need to have Because if you want to stay up on top and want to be a part of all the markets, you need also to be there. We have seen some B2B companies starting with influencer marketing. Not that normal, but it works okay. But I would say if you work with B2C and want to be successful, you need to look at influencer marketing as a long-term also. Enough that's something you do maybe once a year, because then you won't be get the effect that you actually want, right.

Speaker 1: 12:47

So it's more of a an ongoing thing, rather than just doing it and then forget. It's not something you do once. Essentially, this is like it's it's a channel and you need to stick at it and do it as an ongoing process, okay, so are there any like? Obviously there's different places that the influencers put content. Is there any favorites you've got? Are there anything that work better? Because obviously there's tiktok, there's instagram, there's facebook, there's youtube. Does that mean there's probably even more? I mean, I'm, I'm of a certain age now. Like you know, my kids are teenagers and they're they're just constantly on all the all these different platforms. Snapchat again, yeah, there's one, that's the one I was thinking of that I couldn't remember that. They're always on, so is is. Is there any like particular channels? Do you favor or should you be choosing like influences that that cross posted across multiple different platforms? Um, yeah, where the platforms sit, are some better for some industries and some better for others.

Speaker 2: 13:42

You know where the platform I believe that the most important three are youtube, tiktok and instagram, because we have seen that they have the most value that you actually could bring. So I would say, but at the start, you could start with one channel, try it out, and you need also, as I said, in those platforms. You can decide if you want to search influencers in YouTube, tiktok, instagram, and then you can decide also where your audience will be the best fit, because I want to always take influence marketing a step back, but focus on the audience. Do like you always do. Don't focus on the person in the start. Focus on your audience and understand where you will get the best reach and engagement level right, so some, some brands, might find their audiences on youtube mainly so they'll focus you.

Speaker 1: 14:44

Then you'd want to focus on youtubers. Some might be find their audiences mainly hanging out on tiktok, so then they'll they'll gravitate towards influencers who focus on tiktok. So that, so it's really about. Yeah, again, you need to follow where your audience is and then find influencers on on the platforms that the audiences are on. Switch, yeah, so so is. Is there other? Do you ever find that? There's many where, um, the audiences might be in multiple places and those influencers might be posting on multiple places?

Speaker 2: 15:16

Yeah, and that could make sense. It all depends on how you want to do your marketing, because just I mentioned it a bit. But if you want to succeed with influencer marketing, if we look at the companies that actually do that, they take around 10 to 20 percent of their marketing budget. So it's not an add-on right, it's that you do instead of something else right, okay, interesting.

Speaker 1: 15:43

So you might say well, would you say you're a company spending a lot on adwords, you know? Or google ads. It's called now and it might decide, and I know from experience that that is now getting harder and harder to make a return on um, because google just take more. They just take more and more of the percentage. They want to leave you with one cent on the dollar, basically, don't they? You know? Um, that's what they consider a success point, um, so you're saying so the best way of starting out is just taking some of your existing budget and then putting it into into the influence side.

Speaker 2: 16:17

You said 10 to 20 percent was a good start, depending on how big budget you have and because we have seen a lot of companies succeeding only by using influencer marketing. A swedish company where I'm from books Booksbollen, if you heard about them.

Speaker 1: 16:34

Oh, boll Books Online. Yeah, yeah, were they around maybe a long time, bollcom Because, yeah, at one point before Amazon really got going in the UK, if you wanted to buy a book, bollcom was one place of getting it. I think I might have bought stuff off bollcom years and years ago before amazon just destroyed them in the uk when it came to that. So, yeah, yeah, I know who you mean what we can see.

Speaker 2: 16:56

Some companies, if they do it right, they can only work with the currency marketing. But once more, then you need to be some more of a b2c company, because you won't succeed in the same way with b2b.

Speaker 1: 17:11

Okay okay, so if you've, so we've got to the point. So we've, we've found some influencers, we've, we know, our audiences, we've, so we've saved our audiences on, you know, on this social network. We've found some influencers, we've sent them some product, or we've, I presume, for the bigger ones we've paid them some money and sent them the product. Um, how, after we've, after that's done, and and they've put out content, how do we measure the success of that content? How do we measure how well we're doing?

Speaker 2: 17:40

that's extremely good question, because it depends on what your goals are, because for some people, it's brand awareness to build the brand awareness, and then you you need to focus on how many views did we actually get and which which people actually saw our ad. And because if you use a platform once more we both love platforms you will get all the data. So, right, if you want brand awareness, you can see how many views it is. If you actually reach your target that you were supposed to. You can also look at the ctr, if you want to, to see how many you actually went and went to your website and that you can also use. You know the classic one discount code and then you see directly. You know everything gets integrated if you have a platform and you get all the data you will ever need. You can also see which influence works best. Which one should we use?

Speaker 2: 18:40

or which channels works best. So, as I said in first, marketing in the past was something nice that, but now, when it's a need to have, you need to have some platform so you can actually show your manager. This is what influence marketing brings.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Yeah, what's the return of doing this?

Speaker 2: 19:02

And nowadays you are able to do that. In the past you couldn't in a nice way, but now you can actually prove some value okay, fantastic.

Speaker 1: 19:12

So in terms of the sort of the mechanics of call to actions that you can have. So someone's produced a piece of content, you're an e-commerce site and essentially you want sales, say, for example, you're going for sales, um, and we've got our sort of our makeup. We've got our you know it's mascara or something. Um, the reason I'm talking makeup is I've got a friend of our makeup. We've got our you know it's mascara or something. Um, the reason I'm talking makeup is I've got a friend who's developing a makeup brand at the moment. He's going to sell on amazon. I don't think he's going to do any influencer marketing at this point.

Speaker 1: 19:38

Anyway, so I'm not trying to fish for him, but he's. I was just talking to him earlier today about it, so he's got this mascara, um, so, so you've got. So you've got your mascara and you've sent it out to some influencers and your key metric is you want to drive traffic to your website for sales. Can you track from the, say, they're going on TikTok. Can you track clicks from TikTok, or can you even put links on TikTok so that the influencer can kind of drive people to click to buy, and can you then track that? Can you then track the traffic and then sales that arrive at your site? Is that?

Speaker 2: 20:16

possible to do. That's the easiest way people do today is that they use some kind of discount code. So, for example, if it's my brand and I'm pitching the mascara, I would say use Mark for 20% off, because then it's even easier to follow up. And if your audience has good engagement with the influencer, that would actually give even more effect, because then it feels like me as an influencer. Give you, my follower, something for following me.

Speaker 1: 20:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so they get their discount, which boosts you as the influencer. Then the brand gets people in and hopefully they're looking for repeat sales so they can put a discount code on. Yeah, that's fine, I can make sense. Are there any you need to look at? I'm thinking now the legalities of um, because I've seen in the uk there's been various like the big influencers, that sort of the super influencers who are on tv and stuff who've who've got in trouble for posting tweets or um things on tiktok and not mentioning that they had a relationship with the brand that they were pushing. So, um, as a brand owner, what kind of things? I'm not. I'm assuming that the platforms are probably really good at educating. The influencers are on there, but just just what is? It's important as well to know, as a brand, what those things are. So what? What are the regulatory things that you need to make sure that anything that you're associated with meets so that you don't get any trouble with?

Speaker 2: 21:55

standards. So most of the platforms has an approval part in those, which means that the influencer need to send the material before and they are not allowed to post before it approval. So that is like the etf way of solving that problem okay, right, brilliant, right, yeah, so, so, literally, oh, so the?

Speaker 1: 22:17

so the platform is then pre-approving anything that goes out before the influencer eventually gets all right, okay, that's, that's really, that's really really good. So I think I suppose I do. Yeah, so I need to try some of these platforms. So how much do you have to pay for the platform on top of what you pay the? I mean, obviously the platforms have got to make their money, haven't they? So how do the platforms? What have I got to pay a platform to use it?

Speaker 2: 22:41

Yeah, so, somewhere between 150 euros, uh, up to yeah, five, 6,000, depending on and some platforms don't even have a monthly fee. They take a percentage of your spending instead. So there are a lot of different platforms out there. Just one thing I want to mention, because we are almost the same generation, but the new generation is pretty fun because you and me see TikTok. Okay, they scroll and watch something, but they are using it as a search engine.

Speaker 2: 23:20

so if they want to find something, they use TikTok or Instagram, and that is your core business, as I know, but if you look, look as a brand, if you know that you have something that people are searching for, you also need to have relevant content on tiktok and also youtube okay yeah, if they search there, because then you become, you answer the question and you build your trust as a brand. So it could be an easy way of how to use the mascara in the best way, for example and yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 24:03

So is this? Is this something you use influencers for, or is this content we should be putting out ourselves?

Speaker 2: 24:08

I would say that you should use influencers, but you should buy the content and use it on your own TikTok page.

Speaker 1: 24:17

Ah right, so that's so. When an influencer creates something, so you've used an influencer to create some content that they put on their own feed you then take that content they've produced and then put it on your own feed, so you reuse the influencer's content on their own feed. You then take that content they've produced and then put it on your own feed, so you reuse the influencers content on your own feed. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 2: 24:35

because then you get the trust from all right first followers and that you also get opportunity to reach out. And in that way, if you find a really good influencer, you should keep them and make them ambassador for your company. Right.

Speaker 1: 24:54

And with those influence, would you so? Is that like you would be paying? Do you pay them additionally if you want to reuse their content? Exactly? So what?

Speaker 2: 25:00

you do when you're you are able, before you start the collaboration, to to add that to the contract and that you can buy it. But otherwise you can always ask afterwards if you're allowed to use that in your other channels and pay a fee for that.

Speaker 1: 25:18

So could a good tech. So if you say I'm doing this for the first time and I'm going in as a complete newbie, right, and I'm trying my first influences, would a good tactic then be to say, try a number of influences and then see which ones perform? And then they're the ones that you then go back to work with again. And these are the ones which you might say can you, can we also buy the content for reuse, so you can kind of like filter down by experimentation uh, which ones?

Speaker 2: 25:52

work better than others, and that's a great way of doing it, because it is like it always is with marketing you need to try, yeah, and something won't work, something will work, and you just need to figure out that it all I. I said money many times, but look at your audience before you decide.

Speaker 1: 26:13

Influencers, yeah yeah, no, that's, that's right. I can see that. That's really, really key because, yeah, if you're a mascara influencer, then you're not. You know you want makeup influencers for your mascara. You don't want, you know, vehicle mechanics. They're very different audiences, I imagine.

Speaker 1: 26:32

Because I know that, yeah, because I use Facebook quite a lot in my social life and reels on that pushes me content all the time. It's interesting to see how it works out, what I like, and so I I get lots of um. I get lots of farming videos, um excavator videos and things like that um, and I also get lots of equestrian stuff because my daughters share that. My daughters both ride and they share videos with me of funny horse videos which I then watched, and then, because I've watched them and it starts showing them to me, but I watched them so I can then send funny ones back to them. So, although I'm not I'm not personally really big into horses, it's picked upon that horses are some kind of part of my life and they show me things like that.

Speaker 1: 27:17

And I've I've seen how um a lot of these influencers, particularly the ones that do the humorous stuff, they don't monetize every um, every sort of piece of content they put out. Um, is that something? When, if you are looking at influencers, is it a bit of a red flag. If everything is like promotional content, do the best influence are they? Are they the ones which have content that's just for content's sake, and then every few pieces they put out will be promotional? Or is it something?

Speaker 2: 27:50

I believe it's all depends on the engagement level and which kind of followers they have. If the engagement level is still high, it won't be any problem. But, as you said, if they are doing a lot of collaboration, maybe the engagement level will drop and then it's not worth to work with them but the platforms will show you that engagement.

Speaker 1: 28:11

So do the platforms show you, like it, that their engagement levels over time. Can you search so you can see if someone's but growing in engagement or you can see those that are dropping in engagement.

Speaker 2: 28:21

You can see that right, and you can also like, if you want to work with the coming star, or what we should call them, you can also, yeah, track how, yeah, how many more followers they have got for for the last month, for example right, so you can.

Speaker 1: 28:37

You could strategically try and find those that uh, yeah, that are rising, but they haven't, and you can see what well this, these people, I think this time next year will be too expensive, right, maybe for our brand. But if we can get them now, we can sort of ride the bandwagon. Yes, jump on their bandwagon and ride and ride that. Yeah, exactly that.

Speaker 2: 28:58

And a platform is also good, because one thing that is hard to understand by yourself, because the cost is on the views, not on the followers, Because a person could have less followers, but they have a lot of views. So then you yeah, because if you want to start without that, it's so hard to understand the value and sometimes for the influencer, they don't really know what they should charge either. So getting some kind of hint on what it should cost it's good for your budget also and it makes sense in game, so you can see that it actually could bring something to you.

Speaker 1: 29:41

Okay, fantastic, fantastic, see that it actually could be bringing something to you. Okay, fantastic, fantastic. I mean I feel like I've just learned so much about influencer marketing and how to get on with it, because it's something I've been thinking about for keywords people use for a long time and I have to go and find some of these platforms now and put in and see if I can find anyone who's where b2b. So I know it's like say I can say it works really, really well with b2c, as, just as having consumed content that influencers have produced over time, as a consumer, I can see that. But the B2B side is maybe a little bit harder, but it's still something I think is worth investigating.

Speaker 2: 30:12

Yeah, and also, that is one point that will be extremely fun to see. Now, 2025, is LinkedIn has started with their own wheels, or what we should call them yes, so I believe that we will see a linkedin influencer and this year and then it will be relevant, yeah, yeah, yeah, to be and let's see, it has not started yet, but I guess maybe in a half year we will see some kind of different.

Speaker 2: 30:42

You will also be able to find linkedin profiles in those platform. Today, I believe, only one has it, and so in the future, I believe this- will be pretty fun to see how it will be yeah, I can.

Speaker 1: 30:57

I can see that because I mean, I've noticed myself over the past year i've've been using LinkedIn more and I've seen, basically on Twitter and other platforms, if you ever got sort of commercial or talked about work or promotional people, you know you're promoting your own stuff, people don't like it and you go back and you sort of get negativity back from that, whereas on LinkedIn it's kind of expected that you are self-promotional or you might be promoting something else, so that people have bought into it. Yeah, I'm going to linkedin. It's about work to themselves and we'll be promoting others. That's what I'm expecting. So it works. Yeah, yeah, and that's really interesting. So I mean, is it before we wrap up? Is there anything that I've not asked? Is there anything that you think there's a bird big, influential issue that you, that you that you want to get across, or anything that you want to add?

Speaker 2: 31:43

uh, to the conversation. Well, I can say audience and then data. That's the most important part. And if you want to try out a easy solution, you should go to getthemescom, and because then you can try out their platform. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I will be glad to help you?

Speaker 1: 32:10

yeah, well, I'll put links to those in the show notes. And so, in terms of if someone is looking, say there's a listener out there and you know they've got a brand that they want to push, but they want some help, is that like a service that you offer? Do you do consultancy for people in this?

Speaker 1: 32:25

okay right, yeah, so if there's anyone listening who's wants to get into influencer marketing and you've got your brand, but you don't know where to start. You want some help, you want an expert to help. You, then get in touch with mark. His details will be in the show notes, um, or search for him mark hillander on linkedin, as obviously seems to be the best place to find him. So, yeah, well, I think that probably wraps us up, so thanks so much for coming on. The first guest on SEO is not that hard. So after 200 odd episodes, it's the first time I've been asked someone along to be another voice, and it's been fantastic having you on, mark, thank you.

Speaker 2: 32:56

So thanks very much, take care.

Speaker 1: 32:59

Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me. This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my seo tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that ed is spelled with two d's. You can find me on linkedin and blue sky just search for ed dawson on both. You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 33:20

You can try our, our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online, poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize and continually refine your content and targeted, personalized advice to keep your actual content. Find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimise, continually refine your content and targeted, personalised advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO. Is Not that Hard.