Between Meetings - November 27th
Friday round up of this week's top market stories
It’s Black Friday! Yesterday eCommerce broke more records with 20% YoY growth and $5Bn in sales on Thanksgiving day. We’re already seeing record numbers on the day from Shopify, in what is about to be the biggest eCommerce ever. Apparently I’ve been talking about Shopify a lot, because they’ve decided to send a surprise if we can hit 1,000 on this tweet. If it’s candy I promise to share with all of you that give it a like :)
These last few weeks, growth through influencers has been top of mind, and I’ve collected a few recent posts on the topic in this week’s wrap.
As always, I’ll also be sharing A Book, A Show, and A Podcast from this week!
Facebook
Updates
Facebook is launching numerous programs as part of “Season of Giving”
Donation stickers have long been a popular way to share important causes, and Facebook recently rolled out Instagram Live fundraisers and personal fundraisers too. Soon, Facebook will begin testing a new way for people to create and share nonprofit fundraisers directly within their feed, and they are planning to share more on this shortly.
Launch of Drives, a new Community Help feature that makes it easier to collect food, clothes and other necessities for people in need.
Support Black-owned businesses when you shop with The Facebook #BuyBlack Friday Gift Guide.
Donate blood by connecting with your local blood bank on Facebook.
Consumer Tech & Culture
Facebook is planning to launch Libra in January 2021, as reported by Financial Times. This news comes as Bitcoin rallies to $20,000 and recent highs, right before slumping almost 20% to close the week
In an interesting regulatory move, India sets surge maximums of 20% for ridesharing providers Uber and Ola.
It appears there are no hard feelings over the Ant Financial IPO hold from the Chinese government, as Alibaba and a Shangai government-backed entity have joined forces to enter the EV market.
While it’s not news that AWS goes down from time to time, this week’s outage was a wakeup call to many consumers, who didn’t realize that Amazon’s enormous cloud service arm powered a number of products from their favorite apps to their Roomba.
It turns out that the current administration hasn’t completely forgotten about the TikTok situation, as they issued a 7 day extension for TikTok to resolve ownership in the United States.
Business & Investing
Global stocks close on best ever month, with renewed optimism for a COVID19 vaccine and continued strength in global consumer spendiing.
Salesforce is in talks to buy Slack, and investors are scrambling to find exposure. The question - is it overvalued, and how does this move by Salesforce put pressure on other competitors? I’m thinking we might see a wave of M&A activity as other players look for mergers to close the competitive gap.
Are electric vehicles in a bubble? The success of Tesla this year has prompted huge speculative investment from institutions and retail traders alike. This week, as Tesla posted new highs at a $555bn market cap and made Elon Musk the second wealthiest person in the world (behind our favorite American success story, Bezos), other names in electric vehicles like Nio, Fisker, Rivian, Li Auto, and even charging companies like Blink and Switchback Energy Acquisition (AKA SPAC for Chargepoint), all saw surges in value.
On Influencer Marketing:
Influencers - Growth’s Triple Threat
Influencers are one of the most impactful things a consumer brand’s growth team can invest in.
We give influencers many names:
Social Platforms call them Creators
Nike calls them Athletes
Sephora calls them SephoraSquad
They are also called:
Domain Experts
Celebrities
Key Opinion Leaders
Affiliates
Brand Ambassadors
Members
Super Users
...the list goes on.
Influencers - no matter who they are or what we call them - are powerful because they have disproportionate influence on their individual audiences.
Their platforms and the content they produce have the potential to become a triple threat for growth - driving performance based outcomes, building brand affinity, and producing content (especially content likely to go viral).
Influencers provide unmatched return on investment, predictable cost of revenue, amplified share of voice, and social proof.
The future of content platforms (TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Instagram…), individual monetization platforms (Substack, Patreon, …), social commerce, and the rise of the technology enabled ‘side-hustle’ also guarantee that the impact and scalability of influencers will only increase.
The influencer ecosystem thrives on consumer attention and the ability to monetize that attention. Both have exploded. In fact, there has never been more interest in becoming an influencer.
Brands simply need to capitalize.
Influencer Content vs. Influence
🧵Too many influencer marketing strategies begin and end with producing pretty images and videos for organic and paid social.
Yes, many influencers produce incredible visual content, and platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok command incredible attention-share to effectively deploy that content, but this traditional scope of influencer marketing is limited to people that are capable photographers or videographers.
Influencer marketing that is only centered around content production fails to capitalize on the biggest opportunity - the disproportionate influence that these people have on their individual audiences.
Traditional influencers come in many shapes and forms - mega, micro, even nano - but the truth is everyone, even you and I, have influence. Some simply have more influence than others, and some have larger audiences than others.
Influence also comes in many forms - influencer photos and videos can absolutely influence product discovery and consideration. So can other forms of content and engagement, like:
Ratings
Reviews
Blogs
Referrals
Conversations
Live Streaming
Collaborations
Events
There is a reason why Amazon puts such a huge emphasis on their in-house influencer program to generate reviews, and why brands are jumping to be a part of eSports collabs.
While the ecosystem in traditional forms of influencer marketing are mature and may feel crowded, there is absolutely whitespace across other forms of influence where growth teams can find price arbitrage.
Step 1. Find attention
Step 2. Influence
Step 3. Capture intent
CPA Based Influencer Program
One of my favorite growth strategies allows marketers to scale a fixed, predictable cost per acquisition.
The same growth strategy also produces an enormous amount of content for the brand while enabling share of voice capture with highly engaged audiences.
What is it?
It’s affiliates. Sometimes called referrers, brand ambassadors, advocates, among other names, the affiliate model is simple.
Affiliates are paid per referred purchase based on a predetermined rate, giving growth teams a highly predictable cost of revenue from the channel.
Cost per outcome affiliate programs produce and distribute content, generate awareness, provide social proof, and build brand affinity FOR FREE, until purchases are referred.
The risk vs. reward for the brand is incredibly favorable.
Why aren’t there more successful affiliate programs?
Consumer Pricing Misalignment - It’s difficult to scale a program successfully if affiliate referrals net consumers a 10% discount equivalents but the brand is putting out 20% markdowns
Partner Incentive Misalignment - Affiliates need to have compelling incentive structures in place. Research shows that referral acquisitions are more valuable (higher LTV, longer retention) than paid acquisitions, but many brands are paying out affiliates much less than their average paid media CPA.
Program Infrastructure Deficits - Successful affiliate programs have the infrastructure in place for partners to access product, brand content resource hubs, payout transparency, performance tracking, among others.
Low Awareness - Successful affiliate programs are displayed front and center - post purchase, social accounts, emails, landing pages - not at the footer of the brand’s website.
A well crafted referral program is one of the fastest, most efficient ways to turn every acquired customer into two.
Influencer As Brand
Influencers are incredible at building brands; successful influencers are inherently brands themselves, and many command audiences orders of magnitude larger than most brands’ customer bases.
Influencers are taste-makers and domain experts to their respective audiences.
100 million followers look to Charli D’Amelio for the latest in Gen Z trends on TikTok.
27 million viewers watch Ryan’s World on YouTube for toy unboxing.
20.1 million people look to Chiara Ferrragni for beauty and fashion inspiration.
16 million game enthusiasts tune in to watch Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins play Fortnite, Battlegrounds, Call of Duty, and more.
8.22 million fans reference Binging with Babish by Andrew Rea when they cook meals for their families.
Each of them command enormous engagement, loyalty, and affinity from their audiences - an unparalleled targeting opportunity for brands with relevant products.
In every category, there are influencers, from business leaders to fashion experts to photographers.
All of them have enormous influence on their followers’ everyday decisions and preferences.
The brand that partners with the right influencer instantly captures an overwhelming share of voice in their target consumer audience.
The brand that distributes their product across a strategic set of micro-influencers creates hundreds, if not thousands, of discovery opportunities for future customers.
The brand that puts on the right collaborations and co-produces the right content is seeding the opportunity to go viral.
The brand that aligns their messaging with like influencers builds brand affinity with their audiences.
Influencer As Distribution
Peer to peer commerce, or people centric shopping, is the next whitespace for brands.
As fintech becomes embedded in social media and other content platforms, and service providers democratize access to product storage and fulfillment, people will increasingly become surfaces for product discovery and transaction.
We already discover products from each other - whether it’s in face to face conversation, messaging, watching a video, or seeing someone’s photo.
Today, most of these organic interactions don’t facilitate commerce - we have to leave the experience to learn more about the product, and then likely have to go to a completely separate experience to purchase it.
Embedded commerce changes this.
Tap to buy products from your favorite influencers on your social media feed.
Tell a chatbot you want a certain product while you’re watching a live stream.
Collapsing the discovery to social proof to purchase experience, without leaving the discovery ecosystem (social, content, whatever), creates huge opportunities for both brands and influencers.
Instead of brand destinations, consumers will follow people.
The winners? The platforms that create surfaces combining content distribution, user interaction, and commerce.
A Book, A Show, A Podcast
This week I read Barack Obama’s newly released memoir, A Promised Land. It’s hard to believe we are only four years past his time in the white house, and this memoir serves as a reminder of his impact on our country.
I’m watching The Crown, and I’m not ashamed to admit I’m only on season 2. We’re binging it as we sit on the couch in turkey and gravy food coma haze, and I have to say, it’s a little confusing that they switch the cast on you. Apparently they needed to age the characters… but couldn’t figure it out with makeup?
I’m listening to The Business Casual Podcast, specifically the episode “Ecommerce is Retail’s Promised Land” with guest appearance from Etsy CEO Josh Silverman. Even though Josh plugs Etsy just one too many times for it to be natural, it was great to hear his take on Etsy vs. Amazon, the evolution of eCommerce, and how Etsy has navigated this incredibly challenging, yet opportunity filled, year for eCommerce.