Build a creator roster through targeted outreach and experimentation

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 31:09

   through the whole strategy honestly now i think this would be a good moment to to walk through everything um so yeah like i guess like we were mentioning the first step is kind of figuring out okay like if you're in sas you can do percent of ad spend if you're in e-commerce you'll do percent of gmv and then from there you'll set up the group whatever platform you choose i think tribe is the best one it's the one we use at whisper and then once you have your group set up it's like okay now you have to go actually find the creators and if you think about it it's like imagine you're starting a company from zero and you land on a platform and there's thousands of creators thousands of brands and your company has no history more than likely you're not going to be able to get the best of the best um and this is where a lot of companies go wrong they'll start doing a lot

2. 31:49

   of outreach on these platforms and it's like why would a creator want to work for a brand that has like no money like for example on tribe it says how much money we paid out to creators it's like three hundred thousand dollars it says How many creators we have in the group, and then how many ads we have running or whatever. And when creators see that we've paid $300,000 out, and that we only have 50 creators in, you can imagine the amount of inbound we get. But on the contrary, if you're a brand who has $0 paid out and zero creators, it's going to be really hard to get creators in. So what I did is I went off platform, and I went on platform like Instagram, and you just look up a bunch of keywords. It can be like UGC creators, I don't know, tech, nine to five, lawyer, doctor, sleep, supplements, whatever niche you're in

3. 32:32

   and just go down a bunch of rabbit holes and then you'll land on creators that you like, send them a message and then you also go through their following and follower lists and you also search those same exact keywords because typically good creators, no other good creators. And then I say from around like 150 to 250 DMs over a week and like these should be very targeted DMs. Like it shouldn't be like, well, I'm going to use some mass software and send 3000 messages.

4. 32:55

   It needs to be very, you need to care about the small things because nowadays with like all these automations, like yes, you can do a lot of things fast, but if you do it very fast, you're probably gonna get a lot of slot back or a lot of bad creators back. And I think for outreach, it's still better to do it manually. Obviously it's gonna take a bit longer, but if you do it right, I haven't had to do outreach ever again.

5. 33:15

   And yeah, from those 150 to 250 DMs, you'll probably get like five or six really good creators. Then from there, you onboard them to the group. And then that's where you get to the next step, which would be actually building out the culture, um which is like just doing all these yes events and things for the creators whether it be like meetings um like we host weekly meetings now we're at a stage where we have creator coaches that help keep our creators engaged as well we do giveaways we're hosting a retreat in san francisco next month um we're flying in some of our best creators from around the world so it's like these little things that you start to do to build up more and more culture and then from there so you have a small group of creators you've also set up the like percent of ad spend a percent of gmv

6. 33:57

   and you've also built a culture then from there you can slowly start to add more and more creators and the way we did that at whisper is we probably went from like five to ten ten to fifteen fifteen to twenty we probably added like five to six creators like every few weeks and since you're now since at this point you also have like the five creators and you've probably paid out a bit of money you'll start to get some people start to apply on tribe i think now we probably get like a thousand to a thousand five hundred applications a week so i go through those creator applications and then from there since we now have a lot of creators i keep a really high bar and i only accept maybe one or two or three but yeah we grew pretty slowly and now we're like 50 creators and aside from like accepting creators from tribe one of the things we've done actually is we've

7. 34:39

   introduced a referral program where we will pay creators a hundred dollars per creator they bring into the group and it's not some sort of like mlm pyramid scheme thing like those are a bunch of people on linkedin my post blew up on linkedin and everyone was like this sounds like a scam like sounds like an mlm pyramid or whatever sales and like we're not paying them to just bring creators and it's like we're paying them to send a creator over if i think they're a good fit then we bring them in but we don't want more people in like we're capped at 50 it's not like oh bring me 100 creators and i'll pay you 400 creators then we'll pay another 100 creators like this is very tight knit family and it's just our way of saying thank you for helping us grow the program and yeah those are like some different levers we've applied to kind of grow the group and then that brings me to

8. 35:20

   the last step which i don't know am i going too fast through this or you probably have some questions i do have questions but keep going yeah that brings me to the last step which is like now you have the culture you have the people in the group you have you're at like a decent size you have the the percent of gmv percent of ad spend and now one thing that's going to start to happen is you're getting a lot of ads and your ads are going to show like in the group it's going to show okay which is the ad asking the most spend the second will spend the third spend and your creators can see these things and like obviously you want them to see it but it can also backfire if you're not like good at coaching your creators because these creators will see the top performing ads and like they'll be like okay i want i'm going to copy those ads as well i'm going to

9. 35:56

   copy what they're doing and if you end up doing that what ends up happening is you get 300 ads that all look the same, they all feel the same. In meta, when an ad is like more than 60% similar, it ends up grouping it together, whether it's like the same t-shirts, you're in the same setting, you're saying the same words. Like Andromeda is super complex now. And for example, it'll scan your ad like five times over, it'll pull the transcript, it'll pull like each frame out, it'll look at the text on screen.

10. 36:22

    And if you like think about it, like nothing is gonna get past that. And that's why you can reach ad fatigue really quickly if you're constantly repeating the same formats, the same messaging, the same people. So what we do is we continuously push these creators and remind them the reason these creators are making so much money and that their ads are at the top is because they kept experimenting and they kept leaning into what they weren't actually good at as creators and what interests them as creators.

11. 36:46

    And if you just follow what person A, B or C are doing, then your ads are just going to rank under them and you're not going to get any spend. So we constantly push creators to just keep experimenting, keep doing crazy stuff. And when you look at some of the ads in our library, it's like that's why I say like the creators sometimes understand the product better than me and come up with better concepts and ideas better than me and that's why I stay away from briefs like one example of a really good ad that we had recently was this this creator had his keyboard outside his window on a roof and it was raining and it was like okay so it's like it stops you because it's like a very interesting visual hook and then it pans over and on the thing it says what is my keyboard trying to say?

12. 37:26

    And it pans over to his laptop and it's like the raindrops are typing and then it starts typing random words and then it says download Whisperflow. And that ended up becoming one of our best performing ads. It's like, I don't even know how he came up with that. So kudos to him. But that's what happens when you keep it really open-ended, you have a fun product and you let the creators have fun and just keep experimenting.

13. 37:46

    And yeah, like no two ads in our ad library look the same. Wow, amazing.