Dmitri Cherner

I've been doing influencer marketing for over 10 years. I started out as a youtube multi-channel network, looking at how channels grow. The term "influencer marketing" wasn't as well-known then. Basically I looked at how content creators were building audiences, how they schedule their contents. I also learned about brand integrations, and how we managed things to keep on growing there. After that, I went to an agency called ZEFR where we were doing much larger deals. We worked with Coca-Cola, Walmart, and much larger budgets, high-tier creators, and more creative stuff. But ultimately, Influencer campaigns still felt like a standalone. After that, I went over to the brand side to Ruggable and built their Influencer program from scratch. I went on and built programs at another 2 brands and it continues into where I am today.

I've mentioned before that influencer marketing used to be a really small part of marketing, whereas now it has definitely become an integral part of marketing more broadly. Every marketing org should have a dedicated budget and resources for Influencer as a channel. I often refer to influencers as the tip of a spear. It should be your first creative approach. Obviously, you still need to focus on growth and brand, but what I can see evolving nowadays is how unique social content creation and influencers have become a primary avenue instead of an afterthought.

There is one from Ruggable that stands out. It was a creator known as GoCleanCo. Her name is Sarah, she has this home cleaning business, and she was one of the earlier creators who popularized "CleanTok". She made deep cleaning videos- those are very satisfying to watch. We think that she was perfect for our brand, and she was exploding at that time. Almost immediately, she drove an enormous number of sales and was really successful. Because we knew that she's loved by her audiences, we gave her the freedom to create promotional content within a very short time. Everything was a success, and ultimately we sent a professional production team to where she lives. It's surprising how an unnoticeable field like influencer marketing has the potential to develop very big, long-term partnerships.

Every brand program that I've built has been a performance-based program, and the main KPIs we are looking at are Return on Investment (ROI), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and Cost Per Click (CPC). The challenge is that all of these influencers’ audiences are built on social platforms, so you kind of stuck with whatever Meta, or TikTok, or YouTube provide. It's really hard to figure out how to drive people away from these sites. In a lot of cases, brands are moving away from discount codes and links because it's not quite enough to get them to purchase outright…they’ll likely consider it and then go back to scrolling and that's just the nature of how people are shopping online. But generally we're still tracking the average KPIs for socials, such as views, impressions, engagements, likes and comments on a daily or weekly basis.

Software and tools are absolutely critical. There's no way to really scale a program efficiently without bringing it out on a platform to help you operate. I like a platform that has built the actual campaign structures for program management. I still use Google Sheets to this day to manage and keep track of all of these things. I've been using Aspire for years because of their unique relations with Meta, I use an app called Archive for social listening, and I like Tagger as well.

First one is obviously attribution. I think it will become easier overtime, but it's just getting more difficult to better connect the dots between who's providing what value, and how much value. The number of creators you can work with and actually provide performance value became smaller. Second is scale. It takes only one person to build multiple ads and click a button to increase spend and drive sales via paid social- most of it is automated. While with influencer, you're having unique conversations with each of them, you can't automate that. Scale means that the bigger a campaign is, the more people are going to be involved. Last one is creative. Not all creatives are going to work, and it's really challenging to know what will hit and scale. You just need to let the influencers do their thing. Give them guidelines but don't over restrict them.

I think one of the biggest challenges is going to be AI. The version of AI that we are seeing today is the worst that it will ever be. And so as it continues to improve, there is a guarantee that it's going to be more prevalent and will change a lot of how we do things today. A lot of brands might think that it would be better to work with an AI that you can take full control of, rather than taking the risk to work with someone you don't know. The other thing is, how these platforms continue to evolve. Every platform has wild periods of instability, and I think creators need to try getting out of these platforms and create their own websites or newsletters.