The Present and Future of Influence Marketing

We’re creeping up on a year of Winfluence the podcast and in that time we’ve talked to a number of incredibly smart people who are working to make the influence and and influencer space better for creators, brands, service providers, agencies and beyond. I think by now you all probably get a feel for my perspective on influence marketing being more about finding ways to create influence than finding people who are influencers. And the relationship building over time is preferred to one-off, transactional campaigns.

One of the things I like to do on the show is gut-check my own thinking with other experienced influence marketers. It gives you an opportunity to hear someone else validate those thoughts, or for someone to bring a new perspective to the table and even call B.S. on my take, which is perfectly in-bounds here.

Jeanette Okwu is one of those people in the industry I respect a lot who I’ve wanted to have on the show for a while now to bounce ideas off, vet perspectives with and so on. She’s the founder of Beyond One, an influencer marketing agency and network based in Berlin. Prior to that she  was the co-founder and CEO of 1nfluencersmarketing, a technology platform used to drive influencer campaigns based on data-driven insights. 

Her work over the years led her to be named on of Talking Influence’s Top 50 most influential people in the industry. She is also a founding member and advisor to the American Influencer Council.

Jeanette and I connected to talk about the influencer industry. It’s size and potential. How influencers and creators collaborate with brands and vice-versa. I think you’ll find it very interesting that the perspective of influencers isn’t different from the U.S. to Europe and the perspectives we often discuss here are right in line with what she sees halfway around the world.

We get granular, too. Jeanette shares how she finds the right influencers, what she looks for and how she approaches building strategies for brands. 

She’s one of the most well-networked and influential people among the influencer industry, so having her on the show to learn from is a big deal, and a big thrill.

Today’s episode is sponsored by my friends at Tagger.

They reached out to me recently and asked me to give their influencer marketing platform a try. I set up a campaign with a client project and kicked the tires. I wasn’t sure an influencer marketing platform could really impress me much anymore, but boy was I wrong.

I was so impressed, I’ve switched to using Tagger for client projects.

Here’s what got me: I didn’t do a demo or training session. I just jumped in and tried to hunt and peck my way to figure it out. Within an hour, I had a campaign set up for a client, a campaign brief loaded, five influencers invited to authorize into the platform for automatic reporting, including Instagram Stories by the way, and two customized reports for my client. One for assessing influencers, the other for measuring the campaign’s success.

The client saw that report and said, “This is what I need to show to senior leadership!” I call that a win-win!

The drag and drop customizable reports took me about five minutes each to set up. And I can either create new ones for each client campaign, or I saved the first two as templates I can plug any client into. 

We’ll be talking a lot more about Tagger in the weeks to come here on Winfluence. They’ve just built a better mousetrap. So I’m in.

You can see more at jasonfalls.co/tagger.

The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.

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