Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Leveraging Influencer Commerce About this episode CEO Jennifer Silverberg from SmartCommerce, a martech platform specializing in driving conversions for CPG brands, delves into the world of leveraging influencer commerce. Discover how tapping into influencer marketing can enhance your brand's reach and engagement, ultimately boosting your sales and customer connections. Explore the innovative strategies and insights shared by Jennifer in this episode of the MarTech podcast. Show NotesConnect With: Jennifer Silverberg: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro. How are you, everybody? Today, we're going to talk a little bit about what's happening in influencer content. And you're joining us live here. We're on LinkedIn, we're on YouTube, Facebook, I think we're on Twitter, X, whatever we're calling it as well. We're trying something different, and we're basically recording out loud now. And for the brave people that are joining us, we hopefully get to reach our audience here on all of those channels, but get to have a conversation which involves you as well. So if you're listening to our live stream, feel free to comment. We can bring your comments up, and we'd love to have you as part of our conversation here. Today, we're going to be talking about influencer commerce.
1:59 Speaker 04 Joining me is Jennifer Silverberg, who is the CEO of Smart Commerce, which is a Martech platform that helps CPG brands drive more conversions. She's also the co- Host of the CPG Scoop Podcast. So we're going to learn a little bit about consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, also a lot about what's happening with the younger demographic, Gen Z. So to start off, we're going to basically break our conversation, how we do these live streams, we're going to break them into two separate topics. The first topic is going to be understanding what's happening, leveraging influence for e-commerce and making sure that everybody understands leveraging influencers for e-commerce. We're also going to break our
2:39 Speaker 04 conversation into the second part, which is making sense of Gen Z's online habits. Jennifer, welcome to the Martech Podcast. Very excited to have you here. Thank you for being so brave and joining us on this live stream. How's your Wednesday going?
2:55 Speaker 05 Oh, my God, it's amazing. But this is the highlight so far today.
2:58 Speaker 04 You've made it to the mountaintop of the week. It's hump day and you could just cruise all the way down the hill, all the way to Friday, and then enjoy what you're doing for the weekend.
3:07 Speaker 05 I don't know about that. To me, Thursday and Friday are always the big ones.
3:11 Speaker 04 Naturally, as we start doing a live stream, the construction project next to my house has somebody that is having their car alarm going off. Can you hear that?
3:20 Speaker 05 I can. And that is the way that podcasts go these days.
3:22 Speaker 04 This is the beauty of recording live. All right. Well, Jennifer, we've got two topics that we want to cover here. As I mentioned, the first one is going to be leveraging influencers for e-commerce. So I want to start off by doing a couple of segments. Actually, before we get to that, we're going to do a segment we call elevator pitch. We'll pretend here that I'm going to press the button. We're going to hop in an elevator. You're in Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm in the suburbs of San Francisco. It's a beautiful day in Burlingame, but we're going to pretend we're in one of those big buildings in New York City. We're going to go up 42 floors. And I want you to give me your elevator pitch of who you are and what your experience is. You've got 30 seconds.
4:04 Speaker 05 Me personally, who I am? I thought you were going to ask me about smart commerce.
4:08 Speaker 04 We're going to get there, too.
4:09 Speaker 05 I personally spent about 35 years in CPG marketing and really I was a marketing consultant during that time and worked with everything from startups to Fortune 500, then found myself really honing in in the technology space and then wound up seeing this opportunity and became a founder. So that's my short path. So I'm a founder with a bunch of CPG experience.
4:31 Speaker 04 Lots of CPG experience. Tell me a little bit about smart commerce because we're not quite to our floor yet.
4:36 Speaker 05 Awesome. Smart commerce helps CPG brands sell more stuff, both online and offline, by turning all of their digital touchpoints and now some analog touchpoints into starting points of commerce. Basically, understanding that the world has brought where consumers discover products very close to where consumers buy products, which is all on here, and leveraging that to the benefit of selling more CPG products.
5:01 Speaker 04 For anybody listening on the podcast, when Jennifer says here, well, we're going to turn this into a podcast. So here, she's holding up her phone, right? Everybody does commerce on their phone. That's the vast majority of where the transactions happen these days. Jennifer, I want to talk a little bit about the subject of the day, what we're doing with influencer commerce today. Let's start off with a little game that we like to call, what's the word? So when you think about the nature of leveraging influencers to drive commerce, let's start off with the word that you think is most representative of where we stand today. What's the word for e-commerce leveraging influencers in 2024?
5:40 Speaker 05 I'm going to take out the word influencer because we're going to talk about what influencer means and it can mean a whole host of things. And I'm going to take the E off of your commerce because it's become where it's just kind of commerce. I mean, when you buy something online and you go in the store, is that commerce or e-commerce? It's commerce. So the word I would say for commerce right now that is driving everything is on demand. And I hope we get the chance to talk about what that means, but it's changing everything. And what it's doing is it's putting influencers in a really interesting position to be able to drive this on-demand action on behalf of brands and in partnership with retailers. So it's a new paradigm that are emerging out of this. It's not just a new platform, it's a new paradigm.
6:21 Speaker 04 That's really interesting that on demand, let's call that hyphenated and throw it in as what's the word on demand, on dash demand, on demand is the word for influencers in commerce today. And when I think about that term, mostly as it relates to influencers, I think about the immediacy of getting something. When you say on demand, do you mean that influencers are helping drive real time purchases, that they're speeding up the pace of the purchase decision?
6:51 Speaker 05 They are doing everything from driving the desire of the product and desire right now has, and particularly you asked me about Gen Z, Gen Z has the expectation, because they've grown up this way, that those desires will be immediately fulfilled. So if they want coffee, if somebody talks them into you need a whatever, whatever frappuccino, and you have to try this thing, they know that they are a couple of clicks away from having that thing delivered to them. And one of the most common things I hear, particularly around older marketers, is these, these young Gen Z's are acting so weird. They're getting a $6 cup of coffee delivered for another $6, they're paying $12 for coffee. They're going to outgrow that. And for all of us who were marketers, we know that we act as a cohort and how we're going to behave when we're 60 is
7:36 Speaker 05 much more like when we're 20 than how the 20 year olds now are going to behave like 60 year olds now. They're going to carry this with them because they were taught it during COVID. They were taught that the distance between desire and fulfillment of that desire is a click.
7:48 Speaker 04 Is that something that we're seeing that is specifically focused towards the younger demographics? Like I think about my kids and I think that they are just used to being able to order something and it shows up the next day or have everything delivered. It wasn't always the way that I grew up. Like my expectation is you have to go and get something if you want it immediately. And they live in a totally different world. Is the younger demographic, the one that needs this immediacy? Or have we all adjusted to this sort of new on demand nature where we decide that we need everything when we want it and we want it right now?
8:27 Speaker 05 We are all adjusting to some degree. We see it in the data. We're all definitely adjusting, but the younger generation is an expectation. In the older generation, what we're seeing is kind of, I'll call it a wardrobe of behaviors. You know, if it's raining, I might have somebody bring my groceries to the house, but if it's a beautiful day, I might go into the store. The younger generation will go into the store to look for ideas, but they're liable to go to the store, find the thing, and then come back out and have it delivered to them because they don't want to carry it. There are certain paradigms that we come to expect because that's what we've always seen. We've always seen that we have to go into a store and push around a cart or try things on or whatever. The younger generation goes, well, I don't understand why on earth I would take two screaming three-year-olds into a store. I would just have that thing delivered
9:10 Speaker 05 to me. It becomes the default. It's the default behavior.
9:13 Speaker 04 I went to Old Navy where my wife works this weekend because it's the beginning of school today. And I told my seven-year-old son that we were going to go buy new clothes so he can look good, feel good for the beginning of school. We called them our LFGFs. Tried to, you know, market it, give him an acronym, and he lost his mind. He was like, just send it to me. Just you order, you pick it, send it to me. And I'm like, oh, my God, we live in a world where we can't drive five miles away from our house to go to a store to pick out the clothes so you could try them on. They're totally shaped. I want to move on to our second segment, which we're going to call toss-up. So toss-up, it's a 50/50. You got to decide which way you're going
9:54 Speaker 04 on. Something that I think can lean either way. When we're thinking about the impact of influencers on commerce, obviously, it's a growing marketing channel if you're trying to sell goods and products. But we also think about the paid social has been an incredibly powerful channel. If you are running an e-commerce brand and you have to decide on being reliant on one channel versus the other, are you going to try to prop up a performance marketing campaign? I'm going to figure out my spend on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, what have you? Or are you going to start an influencer campaign that tries to build understanding impulse, influence to
10:36 Speaker 04 drive sales? What's actually working? It's a toss-up. You call it in the air.
10:40 Speaker 05 In the air, I'm going to take both. I'm going to use the influencer content to have the paid reach.
10:46 Speaker 04 That's not how the game is played. You gotta pick one.
10:49 Speaker 05 I get to make the rules if I'm here, right? So, no. And that's what I would do. I'll be honest. If I were handed a brand right now, which we ask ourselves this all the time. We have an ongoing survey of the last $5 billion of products that we've seen go into carts at retailers. And we watch the actual behavior that the consumer took. Where did they start? Where did they go in the middle? How did the product get to the cart? And we're always analyzing that. And the question we're always asking is, if I owned a CPG brand, how would I, knowing this data and being able to see this data, how would I change my behavior? And the way I would change my behavior, absolutely, is I would rethink advertising. The typical advertising, now 20% brighter or wider or
11:31 Speaker 05 whatever, is ignorable. But a human being recommending something, a human being showing how they use something, is much less ignorable. We're wired intrinsically to connect with other humans. And when we see other humans, the ad, because it's still paid media, right? The ad becomes something different and something much more interesting and something that we pay attention to. Because whether it's paid or not, all attention is earned. There's paid media and there's earned media, but all attention on the side of the consumer is always earned. So I would use the influencer to help make the paid media work better.
12:05 Speaker 04 What I'm hearing from you is that your paid media is your workhorse for driving conversions. But your demand generation is mostly your influencers. You're building awareness and knowledge of your product. You're trying to get people to have some impulse. But without the performance marketing, you just don't get the reach and frequency that you need to start to drive conversions. Am I getting that right?
12:32 Speaker 05 Well, I think they exist side by side because people talk about a funnel and funnels are hilarious. They're great if you're buying a car or you're buying, I don't know, a TV or something like that. It makes sense to build a funnel. If you're selling green beans or one of my favorite examples is always Chipotle mayonnaise. I just mentioned Chipotle mayonnaise. You now are going to go look for Chipotle.
12:50 Speaker 04 I cannot stand Chipotle mayonnaise. Everybody puts it on every, it's my likely.
12:53 Speaker 05 Okay.
12:54 Speaker 04 We went to Belize, Chipotle mayo on everything. And I was like, I just don't like the flavor.
12:59 Speaker 05 I try to find the right one for you, but the idea, let's say there's a Chipotle mustard. I don't know, but you hear about it and you go.
13:06 Speaker 04 Chipotle, that's the problem.
13:07 Speaker 05 You either say, yes, I want it or no, I don't.
13:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:10 Speaker 05 It's no, I don't. But you don't have a funnel. You don't go into consideration mode and then, you know, awareness to consideration to whatever. You literally want that thing now. So what Smart Commerce does actually, just to go back to that definition, is we give the influencer a link so that the consumer can click and drop that product into the cart at their favorite retailer in that moment that the influencer influences them. Because if an influencer is influencing you to buy an iPad or something, that is a high funnel activity. But if an influencer is saying, here's a cocktail, you should make it tonight. Click here to drop all these cocktail things into your Walmart grocery cart or wherever it is you shop. The influencer becomes the mechanism that drives the sale. They actually do close the transaction in that moment.
13:53 Speaker 05 And they should close it because the alternative is you have to remember later that you saw this influencer thing. And I don't know about your behavior, but I'm gonna hold up my phone again. When I'm looking at influencer content, I'm scrolling.
14:04 Speaker 04 I'm not thinking about buying mayonnaise on my phone most of the time. And that's not where I'm being influenced. That is more of a commodity product. Now, where I do think you run into something that, whether it's a funnel or something that needs to be marketed, every product needs to be marketed, but something that needs more marketing is a new version of a product, right? There is the notion of what is the hot product for today? What is the drink of the year? What is the flavor? What is the thing that is getting people to try something different? Do something new? And honestly, most of the time, this is just an excuse to sell more mayonnaise because they're dropping some Chipotle powder in it and have the same product. But you. Keep continual sales. You've got to innovate. You have to do something new and to show how
14:47 Speaker 04 the product is being used and what it's good for. Influencers are incredible like that. If you start doing your performance marketing on your Chipotle mayo and nobody knows that Chipotle mayo is great for tacos, it can be on eggs, you can use it in salads, whatever you're going to use it for, no one's going to buy. So you do have to plant that seed first. Influencers are great for that. I want to move on to the last segment for this topic, which is what we call game plan. So in game plan, what I want to do is ask you about the nature of getting an influencer campaign off the ground. Everything that I've heard about influencer campaigns and if it has experienced is if you get the right influencer who has the
15:30 Speaker 04 right message and the right audience, oh man, chef's kiss, you can get an incredible performance at a relatively low ROI. But the problem is there's a lot of ifs there and it's also hard to manage a lot of influencers when you have them all gobbled up on the same time, right? When you're trying to manage a whole bunch of influencers and you're running this not as a one-to-one, but a one-to-many campaign where you're reaching lots of influencers. So give me the game plan for how smart e-commerce brands are getting influencer campaigns at scale off the ground today.
16:05 Speaker 05 I'm going to break it into two answers. I think the big brand, because we work mostly with big enterprise brands and they use some of the big influencer agencies, whether it's Inmar or Linky or whoever, they're using the big influencer agencies. But I think the bigger thing is to really think beyond, I call that traditional influencer. I was in Cannes for the Creativity Festival this year. All the buzz was around breaking influencers into the mega influencers, who are the ones, we all know their names, the macro influencers, the micro influencers, and then the nano influencers. And nano influencers might be your mom. Let's say that she's a really great cook and anytime she posts anything, okay, great. Anytime she posts anything as a,
16:48 Speaker 05 and that was good, shout out to mom, but anytime she posts anything. All of her friends pay attention to it and they will actually take an action on that. That's how I wound up with Liquid Death, by the way. That's just sitting here on my desk. So I'm going to give it a shout out. Liquid Death Water. You made the comment that some of these products are commodities. They're only commodities if they're not a brand and they only lose that status if the brand doesn't do what it needs to do. But I found out about this Liquid Death Water from a friend of mine who I believe and I trust for all things food. And she said, I don't know what it is, but it's different and you really, really have to try it. It's leveraging those people and figuring out how do you make it so that they remember to recommend this product? How do you give them a platform so it's easy for them to recommend the product?
17:31 Speaker 05 And how do you bridge from that recommendation to the product landing in a cart or getting bought or both? And that's what I would do to answer your question. I would sit down and I would figure out who are the people who are passionate? How do I leverage them and how do I turn them into unpaid nano influencers? And at the same time, you know, get some of the mega influencers and work with your agencies to do that. But in between, look at these other influencers because they're just as influential. You know how many, you mentioned your kids were going back to school. You know how many kids are going back to school and the teachers are influencers for which school, back to school products they should buy? Why are some of the notebook manufacturers and stuff like that? Why are they not leveraging those teachers? They're huge influencers.
18:12 Speaker 04 I hear you. You're saying use agencies to manage the relationship with the biggest influencers, your macro influencers. And then when you get down to micro and nano influencers, it sounds like micro, you probably need some sort of a solution to manage them at scale. The nano influencers, you're really trying to drive them for free. Are there strategies, tools, like talk through this with me? What are the ways to try to drive basically virality and social posting with the people that are influential?
18:40 Speaker 05 It goes back to the, all the old viral concepts, which is you need to give me something that makes it easy and you need to make me feel smart for having shared it or make me feel kind for having shared it. So you put some sort of promotion in for me to send some sort of information to my friends. And so here's $2 off if you go do this thing. Or you give me something that's so amazing that it's It's really easy to share with my friends. I bought a bottle of spirits recently and it had a little booze and it had a little hang tag around the neck and it had a recipe that was on there. But where they were really smart was the recipe wasn't just printed, but there was a QR code for me to be able to scan to go to a page for the recipe.
19:21 Speaker 05 And they said, when you serve this drink at a party and everybody asks you for the recipe, here's the QR code with the link that you can send them easily so that everybody has the recipe.
19:30 Speaker 04 Was it the Hugo spritz? Apparently that's the drink of the year.
19:33 Speaker 05 The what? What is?
19:34 Speaker 04 Hugo spritz is Saint Germain, which is elderflower liquor with prosecco. And you put mint and lime in the glass. You serve it over ice in a wine glass. It's incredible. It's delicious. Drink of the year, apparently.
19:49 Speaker 05 No, this was a gin, but no, that's
19:51 Speaker 04 You can make a gin Hugo spritz and you can booze it up if you want.
19:55 Speaker 05 That's what I'm doing tonight.
19:56 Speaker 04 There you go.
19:57 Speaker 05 And you were just a nano influencer. So if you had a link from Saint Germain that said, here's the recipe, I'll forward it to you, Jennifer, I have it on my phone. That's the kind of thing that you can put together. It made you feel smart. It made you feel helpful. It made me happy that you had shared it with me and it can carry the brand message along with it. It's really about putting the consumer at the center of the equation, not the brand at the center of the equation. Most brands are kind of set up to think of themselves first, but they need to think of the consumer first.
20:25 Speaker 04 Here's my takeaway. We think about what's happening in e-commerce, digital commerce. And in reality, there we can get rid of the E now. It is just commerce. There is not a ton of interaction or difference between what's happening in-store and out-store. We've sort of mastered omni-channel marketing. But when we think about omni-channel commerce, when we think about what's happening in marketing, specifically, you know, e-commerce used to be very driven by performance marketing. And it makes sense. You have a conversion. If you're keeping everything online, you get all this wonderful tracking. But in reality, it's not the only channel that e-commerce or commerce companies need to be thinking about. Your influencer marketing is incredibly influential. It is not just an experimental channel.
21:12 Speaker 04 It is now essentially 50% of your marketing mix. I think that's probably enough. We'll wrap up this episode of the Martech Podcast and move on to our second topic, which is making sense of Gen Z's online habits. Jennifer, thanks for coming on the podcast. That wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. If you're watching on the live stream, thank you so much for joining us. Feel free to leave your comments. If you get them in real quick, we'll try to respond. If not, we'll send you the messages back on LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever you're writing or watching. If you're watching the pre-recorded video, we still do get the comments and we'll write you back if you have any questions. If you're listening on the podcast, thanks for listening to my conversation with Jennifer
21:56 Speaker 04 Silverberg, the CEO of Smart Commerce. If you'd like to hear more from Jennifer, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can visit her company's website, which is smartcommerce.com. Just one more link I want to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes, head over to martechpod.com. We've got show notes, quotes, the descriptions of all of our guests. You could subscribe to be the next guest speaker on the Martech Podcast. You could sign up for our newsletter. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we publish episodes every day. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. If you're on the live stream, hey, subscribe, like, do all the things, five-star reviews. We appreciate you joining us.
22:40 Speaker 04 And that wraps up the episode of the Martech Podcast. That's all for today. My advice until next time is just focus on keeping your customers happy.
23:14 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast and I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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