Brand and Creator Partnerships with Robyn Nissim

Introduction: The Power of Creators

0:00It was found that consumers actually trust creators about brands more than they trust brands [music] themselves. You know, there is an endless need for content. Brands always always need content. They're in search of influence [music] and they are looking to find new ways to reach their targets and prospective targets. And creators, brand is a feeling. [music] What is the feeling that your company is putting out

The Role of Social Media in Business

0:28into the world? A good social marketer operates like the heartbeat of a business. [music] And so what does the heart do? I'm going to ask you, tell me, what does the heart do? The heart pumps [music] blood throughout the whole body. Correct? And that is what a good social media team should be doing. They should be flowing in and out of [music] every single department in your business to find what makes your brand [music] special, what is unique and proprietary and sets you apart from your [music] competitors.

1:01He's better at this than I am. I I admit that all day. >> It's a situation where we waited almost 48 hours to have the utter 100% best for last topic. Robin, welcome to the stage.

Robyn's Journey and Achievements

1:15>> Thank you. >> Standing ovation. My guys, thank you so much. Hi everyone. My name is Robin Nissum and I have built some of the largest and most profitable band social communities on the internet. And so I made a career out of being a millennial and I pedled that literally as far as I could and it let me open up brand channels for Michelin the tire company and five-star dining restaurant. I worked on Nissan. I won a Webbby award. After that I quit the agency world. I was like, you know what? I am carrying the whole team on my back here. I don't need these people. I'm out. And so, I quit and I

The Rise of the Creator Economy

2:00started freelancing. And I was so quickly humbled by the power of global brand recognition. And I learned that when you're Nissan and you're sending a tweet to a global DJ, like, of course, he's going to see it. Hello, it's a household name brand. But when you're working with startups and small businesses that are underfunded and people just don't know, it's a very different story. And so I had to get really scrappy, right? Because I had just left my job and I had results to prove and I had this idea. I was like, "Okay, well, what if we find people online with followings and befriend them and bring them into the brand and and get them to love our product and then maybe they'll talk about it and then like if we have to throw some money at them, fine. will totally do that. And before I knew it, I was shaping what is now a $250 billion industry that we are calling the creator economy. And so that led me to building out Ulta Beaut's

3:00first ever influencer marketing program. It scaled it to a million dollars, went from their in-house to the brand side and was head of social at brands like Anastasia Beverly Hills. took her Instagram following to like 24 million, went to a brand called Aloe Yoga, took their organic social revenue to 5% of overall business revenue. And so, at its peak, I was making $17 million a month just from organic social. And so, I've done so many things. I could sit here and talk about that for hours, but I'm here today because I really just want to teach you guys how to do the same thing.

Influencer Marketing Insights

3:38So, let's find our baseline. Who in the room is actively working with influencers? Raise your hand. Okay, not many of us. So, there's opportunity. of the people who are working with influencers, who knows what creator to pull like as a lever? Who knows who's driving top sales from creators? Okay, that's great. And are we using paid media with creators? Anyone dabbling in that? Cool. So, for my friends who didn't raise their hand and who aren't working with creators, I just want to share some stats with you. And so, as far back as 2019, it was found that consumers actually trust creators about brands more than they trust brands themselves. And then the next year they found that 71% of marketers were actually saying that the quality of customers that were coming through the door from that influencer traffic was better. And then they told us that, you know, for every dollar spent on influencer marketing, brands were seeing almost $6 in return. And just last year we saw that all creator content was outperforming branded

4:55content by 12x. And so that brings us the to this year where marketers have finally fessed up. Almost 100% of them are saying creator content outperforms organic content. It drives stronger engagement and it links to higher conversions. And so that tells all of us that there is a massive opportunity here to drive revenue leveraging creators. And so my for my friends in the room who aren't yet dabbling in that if this isn't enough to tell you to get into it, I'll keep going, keep listening. but listen, just because I'm telling you to invest in creators doesn't mean that that's where you should allocate all of your resources, right? You want to also

Building a Strong Brand Presence on Social Media

5:41invest in brand social. And when I say brand social, I'm talking about Instagram. I'm talking about Tik Tok. I'm talking about YouTube, Facebook, Threads, Substack, LinkedIn, X, all of the platforms, right? This is where your consumers are. Whether you're there or not, they're there. And people potentially are in that room of social media talking about your brand. And so knowing that people are there talking about you, don't you want to be there with the position of, hey, this is who we are. This is how we show up in the world. And allowing people to really get a sense of what your vibe is and what your brand ethos is and what you stand for. Social media is your number one brandowned communications channel. And so the way that I want you to think about it is it's your direct line to your consumers. So if you have a new product or you want to understand what your audience is thinking, this is the best place to get that data. Use it for research. Listen to your customers. See

6:47what they want. Give it to them. Engage with them. Have fun with it. Right? This is a place to commune. You can build community here. And over time, you can actually create revenue from that community. And last but not least, this is your testing ground for paid advertising. And so, who was here yesterday to listen to Gary Vee? Oh, wow. I was expecting more, but it's okay. You guys missed out. And don't worry because I'm here. So, using organic social to prove a concept is only going to help return on your ad spend. And so let's take a look at the landscape, right? Because social media has changed quite a bit and we're now at this point where we are in a discovery era. So what platforms are doing is they are serving content to people based off of what they think you will like.

7:43Meaning content that you've previously viewed, what you've engaged with, anything that you've saved or shared. Right? This is now what they're showing you. The name of the game has changed. And in this new wave of social media, creators rule the roost. So when you open up Tik Tok and you're looking at your for you page, it's mostly creators, right? Same thing with Instagram. You open the explore page and it's creators except for that one sponsored post that someone has paid to get into your feed.

8:16And so this means that there's again this opportunity for brands and creators to partner and really own this symbiotic relationship because at the end of the day if you work for a brand and you're producing content you know there is an endless need for content. Brands always always need content. They're in search of influence and they are looking to find new ways to reach their targets and prospective targets. And creators, creators constantly need a reason to create. They like to be influential.

8:51They want to be the people who are telling people about your brand or helping people optimize their lives. Or maybe they're telling people, "Let's slow down and they're deinfluencing and your product fits into that bucket." But you guys need to work together, right? As a brand, I want you to think about creators as the vehicle to meet whoever you're looking to meet online. And so the classic pitfalls that I see in this brands trying to get this done are simply sorry, excuse me. AV friends, can I have you pull up the screen a little bit so I can see my notes better, please?

9:35classic pitfalls that I see brands making when they do this is number one, they're going way too hard into performance and there's not enough brand advocacy. And number two, there are no owned owners of roles. So, you don't have someone to own social and you don't have someone to own influencer marketing. And if you do, they're working in silo. they're not working together or crossf functionally or maybe you're making all of this effort to create content but it's living and dying on social and that's a really big no no we can't have that. okay and last but not least there is uncertainty around how to activate like you just don't know what to do.

10:25And so let's talk about the teams and tools and tactics for how we're going to do these things better. And so when

Effective Team Structures and Strategies

10:34we're looking at teams, I want to ask you in your organization, is there someone who owns brand marketing? Do you have someone that is ultimately the designated gatekeeper for brand both internally and externally? Someone who's going to say, "Okay, you know what? Like we just turned 10. this is a huge [ __ ] deal. Let's celebrate it. Let's make it a moment for our customers. Let's have a sale. Let's launch a new product. Whatever, right? Is there someone in your organization that owns brand next? Do they have a budget to execute? Are they able to host events?

11:12Can they create content? Can they work with creators? Do they have a budget that's not being so tightly scrutinized to have a return on investment? Right? Because we know brand is a feeling. What is the feeling that your company is putting out into the world? Is it just performance? Because that could be a problem. Performance is great. We know that performance, growth, digital, whatever you want to call it, is so important because these teams are driving the business forward in terms of measurable outcomes, right? They are creating revenue. And in my experience at at the brands I've worked at, I've seen really successful teams where brand and performance are separated. And in between the two lives social and influencer because it marries them, right? Social and influencer started out as this organic brand channel and now over time it's turned into a revenue driving channel with new tools like paid media and shoppable content. And so now that we know exactly what the vibe is, let's get a little deeper into specific roles and responsibilities. And so I

12:26know this is a lot of text. Don't worry, I'm not going to read it word for word, but if you want to take a picture to take it back to your teams, that's what it's here for. And so top line is brand is the owner of the feeling, right? They set the tone. This is the feeling we want to create. This is the campaign slogan, the tagline. This is our vibe. Okay. Then social owns bringing that to life through content. And so it is my opinion that a good social marketer operates like the heartbeat of a business. And so what does the heart do?

13:00I'm going to ask you tell me what does the heart do? The heart pumps blood throughout the whole body. Correct. And that is what a good social media team should be doing. They should be flowing in and out of every single department in your business to find what makes your brand special, what is unique and proprietary and sets you apart from your competitors, right? And how can I take that information and relay it to our customers in a way that's going to make us seem really relevant and make people want to connect with us. So that is social's job.

13:36They're creating that content and then the influencer team is mirroring social's content strategy to bring that to life and they are owning the entire influencer relationship. And then last but not least there's performance and they are responsible for all of the analytics, the testing, the tracking, retargeting, optimizing and of course revenue. So let me bring this to life to you guys for an example and I'm going to use my time when I was at Aloe Yoga and so brand said okay we are now looking to go from being this yoga brand to something different. We don't just want to appeal to a yoga audience. So we're going to say our clothes are so cute and they're so functional that you could go to a workout class and then after you can go out for brunch, right? just pair it with a jacket and you can go from studio to street. Okay, bet. We're going to do that. So, now all of the channels fall in line. We update our messaging and and the content and the programming to do

14:40that. And so, here is what that looks like from a social influencer point of view. You can see on our yoga channel, we literally have yogis in the street, right? Wearing our clothes. And then we decided, let's test something a little bit different for our non- yogi following. And so I'll show you a video of what that looks like. So really simple, but that content performed so well that we decided, okay, let's throw it on the PDP on the website because for whatever reason, that content is really resonating with audience and it's driving click-through and it's driving conversion. So what did we do? We now took content that was formulated by brand that performed really really well on social and was executed in part with influencer and we're using it crossf functionally.

15:42We're using it on our PDPs to convert higher or to achieve higher conversions, right? Because again we know influencer content is outperforming brand content by 12x and so it should not live and die on social media. And so it's so so so important that there is a constant feedback loop between these teams. This is the flywheel cross departmentally that you guys need to be thinking about and working in. Brand leads social executes leveraging influencer and then you scale with performance whether that's with paid media or extending content to your performance channels.

16:25So now that you know who's responsible for what, I think that we should talk about how these teams bring that strategy to life.

Content Strategy and Influencer Collaboration

16:34And so social content strategy is like a whole beast on its own. It's something that I usually host three-hour long master classes about and barely just scratched the surface of it. And if you're interested in my next one, there's one October 22nd. and I have a whole group training program that goes really, really deep in how to create a content strategy that's ultimately going to support your business, turn social into a key revenue driver, and also turn it into a content engine that supports your business. And that's a lot. We're not getting into that today. But what I will say is that your social content strategy does need to have an 8020 split. And that 8020 split needs to look like 80% evergreen content, 20% revenue driving content. Why do you think that is? Any guesses?

17:31Okay, I'll tell you. The reason why is because nobody wants to be [ __ ] sold to. Like just imagine if you went to a mixer after this and someone came up to you and immediately was like, "Hey, what do you do?" Cool. Yeah, no, actually just buy my product. I don't even want to know your name. buy my product. Oh yeah. Do you want to buy my product? Like you'd be like this person is annoying. Like unsubscribe. Get me out of here. I'm not interested. Get on my face, Nick. Get them out. Like, you know, that's not the vibe. You don't want to behave like that on social media either. That's just not the vibe. And so, we want to split that up into 8020, right? 80% of the time, you need to be engaging your audience, entertaining them, educating them, inspiring them, connecting with them. You need to be talking about cultural moments and trends. And when you find content formats that work for you, double down on them. Repeat that. Create series that

18:27you can continue to use and leverage. And then 20% of the time, talk about your business. Hey, we're having a sale. Hey, we launched a new product. And that is the mix that I found works really well. [sighs] Just taking a deep breath. and so from a brand social point of view, when we're thinking about our content strategy and getting all of this content done, it's hard. It's a lot, right? It's a lot to be posting three times a day across seven different channels. And like I said, brands are always looking for content. Like, who in the room whose job is it to make content?

19:10Bless us. Like, what a life we chose, right? It's never ending. It is never ending. You can never get enough content. And this is where influencer comes into play to help you. Right? So, when you're thinking about your social content strategy, I want you to think about how can I leverage influencer to activate and achieve my goals? How can I leverage influencer to help me make more content? How can I leverage influencer to make my job easier? And so I want to get into an example. When I first started at Aloe Yoga, the brand was just Aloe Yoga. There was no Aloe. There was no Aloe Men. There was no Aloe Wellness.

19:52There was no Aloe Wellness Club. It was just Aloe Yoga. And when you look at the the photos of what that brand was, it's pretty onedimensional, right? It's not super inviting to anybody who is not a yogi. And the goal was to ultimately change that perception. When I was hired, my CEO told me, "I want you to make this brand cool. Do whatever it [ __ ] takes. Make us cool. Make us a it girl brand. Make us street style.

20:20Make us fashion." And I was like, "Okay, sick. How are we going to do that? This is all the content that I have to work with. It's all yoga focused." So, what did I do? I started seeding product to Pilates girls, to girls who were doing weightlifting, to runners, to models, to fashionistas. And what is the result? Boom. Now we've changed the brand perception just leveraging influencer, right? And so you see a huge difference when you look at these two.

20:56You see it? Yeah. Give me a thumbs up if you see it. I'll show you again. [laughter] Okay, cool. So, I want you to think about when you're activating influencer, who do you want your brand to be? Like, what is the energy that you're wanting to tap into? Is it that you are not getting the creative that you want from your creative team? Or is there a different persona that you want to target? That's how I want you to think about activating influencer because as you can see they can help you achieve that and it goes far beyond just a post right.

21:34And so another example is in this time when we opened Aloe, I was only getting yogi content, but we had this huge moment where we were releasing the Flutter legging. And this is her, the Flutter. And I was like, we can't post like yogi content. This is like our first big fashion moment. Like, I need something. And so we created a brief and we hired these two girls and we said, "Hey, we want you guys to film yourself doing something active." And here's exactly what we need. Just 2 minutes of video content, you guys moving your body mindfully, being outdoors, having fun.

22:18Be sure to get close-up shots of your butt and be sure to get close-up shots of your legs. Right? That's like where we're at. and this was the result. >> [music] >> So, we took this content that they gave us and we just chopped it up and we made a video and we put our brand messaging over it and we posted it. And I'll be honest with you, I hated it. I was like, "This is so off-brand. It's weird."

22:49Like, they're on a dirty roof. Aloe would never be on a dirty roof. Like, it's just it's not it. But we had nothing else to post. And we did it. And guess what happened? It sold out within the first hour. And because we owned the rights to this video content, we were able to make 10 different cutdowns. So that when it got restocked, we ran those ads and we were able to turn this Flutter legging into a number one seller for the brand. And that's actually how we positioned oursel as a fashion brand.

23:22And so the reason why I'm sharing this with you is because you really never know how content is going to hit. You just don't. Like I didn't want to post it. I didn't like it. And now it's probably still one of the brand's best top sellers. And so when we're thinking about the influencer process, the name of the game is ideulate, test, learn, and iterate. You are constantly testing. And you're not going to know how something is going to do until you just try it, right? And so this is just a cautionary saying for all of you guys. If someone is promising you instant results from influencer and social like don't listen to them. Like yes there are formats that you can do and and repeatable you know hooks and things that work but at the end of the day every brand is different.

24:09Every influencer is different and you just don't know how that's going to go right. So you have to test and learn. And so some creators are going to help you, you know, bring people into brands. Some people, I'm sorry, some creators are going to push people down the funnels. Some are going to become affiliates. Some creators are going to drive such good revenue that you say, "Hey, you're doing an amazing job. We want to bring you in to get a percentage of every dollar that you make for us because you're [ __ ] crushing it crushing it and we want you to be an affiliate now." and other creators are just going to post content that is not going to do anything for you. And the reality of that is that's okay, right?

24:51Because we know that you have to expose people to your brown your brand countless times before they're ready to get down that funnel. And the rule of seven has changed. They're saying now sometimes people need to expose to your brand 13 times and in other cases more than 20. And so when you're approaching influencer and content, I want you to think about it like a batting cage. Like you're just hitting and hitting and hitting and swinging, I should say.

25:19You're swinging and swinging and swinging until you hit. That's really the name of the game. And that's the way that you need to think about it. And then once you figure out how to hit and once you figure out what hits, you put paid media behind it to really scale. And so things that you could do is you can put that creator content on emails and PDPs. You can create custom landing pages for influencers. You like this creators, look, here you go. Go shop all their favorite products. you can always put discount codes with influencers or use safe links to verify, you know, the attribution that comes from a creator and also enhance the the possibility of making that sale. You can use whitelisting to sponsor posts from behalf the creator's account or you can just dark post, right? And and post normally. There's shoppable content. We all have heard about Tik Tok shop. If you have a CPG brand, 100% go do that.

26:20Like this is the moment for that. live shopping. We talked about affiliates. And so those are all of the ways that we can bring it to life. and some tools

Tools and Tips for Social Media Success

26:32that I found really, really helpful in my journey. If you are working in social and you're posting to multiple different platforms, tons and tons of content on a daily or weekly basis, I really love to use a content management system like Dasho or Sprouto. anything that's going to help people go to your link in bio and shop really easily. Many chat is a [ __ ] gamecher if you want to create automated conversation and engagement and then create custom funnels for your social audience. So if you've ever seen on a post someone say comment below on this post, hi and I'll DM you whatever.

27:13It's like boom. Now you just have an automatic funnel. it'd be crazy to not talk about AI. Like we're in the AI age. I am obsessed with using Chad GPT to help me come up with content ideas. And so, for whatever reason, for better, for worse, my brain happens to just work in terms of snackable content. And as I've worked from brand to brand to brand, I had to create a content matrix to teach my teams to think the way that I thought. And this content matrix now lives and exists in my group training program, running social for brands. and I trained AI on my content matrix. So now I can use chat GBT and come up with an entire quarter worth of like hitting content in no time, which is insane. and then last but not least, a sauna for everything. I'm obsessed with a sauna. I love I just love it. If anyone here works at a sauna or if anyone knows anything about a sauna, like send them my way.

28:19Like sponsor me. I that's like my [ __ ] dream. for influencer content, Yeswware. Who knows Yeswware? Anyone? Okay. Yeswear is low-key one of my favorite tools for influencer marketing because it allows you to send custom emails through mail merges. So, when you're emailing like thousands and thousands of people, all you do is just like put in a little it's not even like an Excel document, like the weird version that you have to upload into Yeswware. Sorry, I'm doing a bad job at that. But you can customize your outreach and you can set it and forget it so that for the next week, Yeswware is like following up for you and handling all of your influencer outreach, which I love. Archive is another game-changing platform. Helps capture all of the content that you are being tagged in online and it has an insane creator search functionality that is AIdriven and works really really well. I love Social Snowball. Great for affiliates, great for campaign management. And then I think it's super important too that when you are working

29:30with influencers just to prompt any sort of like AI whether it's chat or claude and ask like hey chat I'm working at a brand where our values are x y and z and we're considering working with creator a do you see anything in this person's history that could be problematic for my brand and now you're really just like safeguarding yourself before getting into some sort of partnership with a creator. and then last but not least from the performance side, I really love this platform called Pixley. And it allows you to ultimately get approvals on content for you to then use online, which is huge, right? Because we don't want any lawsuits. [laughter] And so, last but not least, I'm going to leave you with I don't want you to forget to scale. And how are you going to do that? Right? Right? So, when you're thinking about influencer marketing and social media and how to bring this all to life, I want you to think about again how are you structuring your internal teams, who

30:37owns what, right? Are you assigning leads to the project? You need to get aligned before you execute anything. Then get super clear on your creator goals. Like what are you creating for? What is the purpose? Are you trying to reach a new market? Do you just need content for a drop? And then when you do that, activate with precision. Give creators your briefs. Make sure that you are using tracking codes so that we can understand what performance looks like.

31:02And then I want you to loop in everyone, right? So that you can share really good content. You can evaluate what's not working and expand on what is working.

Conclusion and Q&A

31:12so before I end, I just want to reiterate social and influencer needs to be fully fully integrated, right? You cannot have one without the other and they work. Oh, and they work in concert with brand and performance. Okay, that is the full ecosystem and it's just a huge way to drive commerce, right? So, if you're not running content through organic before you're putting money behind it, I hate to say it, but you're honestly just wasting money on ads. So, funnel that money to brand and you'll scale your performance. I promise you will. And I get it. It can get really really complicated. I have made an entire career 15 years in this industry and there are so many people in this room who haven't even touched it. So if you want to know more, get in touch. You can scan the QR code. I post on LinkedIn all the time. You can follow me there. I have an upcoming master class online the fundamentals of running social for brands on the 22nd which is a

32:18little taste into my larger group training program. I have a free miniourse on here if you want to know more about influencer marketing. So, lots and lots of good stuff if you scan the QR code. yeah. So, keep in touch, guys. I'd love to hear from you. That's it. Any questions? >> Robin, mic up. Robin, thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, some questions. I'm going to throw this mic around. This gentleman, it's a great shirt. It's a really good shirt.

32:45Coming your way. >> Great shirt. >> first off, great job selling your course. real, recognize, real, like I'm I might go buy it. >> Come through. >> secondly, I love the 8020 that you pitched. I've worked in email a lot and incorporated content into email. I'm curious, so much of this talk on social, how have you seen brands leverage more content into their email strategy. >> So, exactly like I said, right, we're seeing that this content is performing really, really well. Oh, that scared me.

33:18we're seeing it really well now. We're going to get rights to it and we're going to share it with everyone else in the organization. It's really just that simple. something else that I've done is working with creators to have my own social shoots and then in the contract for our shoots, it says anything that's shot here today, I own the content. And so if I'm having a social content shoot with creators, I'm sharing every single thing with the whole company. And we find that it converts. It converts better than anything else.