How Influencer Marketing Can Grow Your Brand and Drive Sales

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Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Hey, listen to what's up, Jeff Zim, for welcome to another edition of The Mortgage Marketing Radio Podcast. I am thrilled you decided to tune in today. I want to make the most of your time and I want you to leave your feeling that this was a good use of your time. Time is, of course, our most precious commodity. We can never get it back. And I'm really focused this year on making this show, these episodes even better than before. Year number six, well over 200 episodes now and we are mixing it up with different types of content. So letting you know that the goal moving forward is to mix up the interviews and the guests and I basically have figured this out last night. Maybe it was in the shower. I don't know. You know, you get those creative thoughts when you're in the shower, but I've been really trying to thank for some time as how do I take this podcast to the next level? There's a variety of different ways I want to do it production-wise, which you're not hearing yet, but you will soon hear some changes on the production elements of the podcast, but also another way to take it to the next level is with interviews and guests and things like that. So I've decided moving forward, this is how we're going to mix up the content at least for the near short term, which is this, out of one episode per week, so essentially four episodes in a month. One episode will be an interview with a loan officer, somebody successful in the mortgage space. One interview will be with real estate agent or somebody who's succeeding in doing some pretty interesting things in the real estate space. One interview will be with a thought leader, influencer, speaker, author, coach, and this could be outside of your industry and very often will be because I think that you often get a lot of great perspective and insights when you're not solely focused in your own industry, but looking outside. And then lastly, one of the interviews or one of the episodes per month will be yours truly, me bringing specific content to you, whether it's what I'm thinking and working on, whether it's news from the streets a day in the life, a day in the trenches of me out there doing the same things you guys are doing, which is, you know, working with the Bull State agents, building my personal brand, right, all that. So those will be the exist at least for now, the four different types of episodes you'll hear. And if you want to add your input to that, have any suggestions? Hey, you can go over to the Facebook group and jump in the podcast, mortgage marketing radio podcast group over there on Facebook. If you want to join the conversation there, you can also leave me a question at askgefanything.com. There's links to all this in the show notes. So you have to do is conveniently tap with your thumb or your finger and you'll instantly go to any one of these destinations. You're hearing my voice describe for you right now. And then of course, lastly is let's face it guys, right, the market has shifted and refives are down and you want more referrals from real estate agents, more purchased business probably than you have in the last couple of years because you've been living high off the refice. I know it. And now that percentage of income is going to be taken away, right? But here's the challenge. There's lots of loan officers going after agents bringing no real value. Therefore what loan officers need is a system to rise above the noise, did not be seen as a number and to get agent relationships and referrals at scale, right? So what we do here at mortgage marketing institute is provide a turnkey done for you process and platform for loan officers to succeed in getting attention, getting conversations and getting referrals from real estate agents. How do we do that? We provide a turnkey system and platform of educational content in the form of classes you teach digitally, over zoom and in person, souped and that's done for you, whether you've never spoken a word in public before or you're, you know, a well versed experienced class teacher, trainer speaker, doesn't matter. I think the challenge that most loan officers have told me is they would be teaching classes to real estate agents if they had the class content done for them, because who has the time to create and prepare that? Well, that's where we come in. That's what we've done for you with my agent classes and what you get is every, you know, we have a library of over 12 turnkey agent classes. We're talking PowerPoints, speaker notes, we're talking, train the trainer videos for me, training you, showing you how to actually teach this class, handouts social media promotional images for you to promote on social media, email campaigns, text campaigns, landing pages for them to make reservations. So you can build your database for real estate agents and tap into that source of ongoing purchase money business. You want to learn more? Real simple, go to mortgagemarketing.pro, check out the short video and you can learn more there. All right. So now to my special guest this week, this is along the lines with me mixing up the content and the guests. And so this week I have my special guest, his name is Jason Falls and Jason is a leading digital strategist, author, speaker and thinker in the digital and social media marketing industry. This guy's done a lot in his career. He's an award-winning and widely read industry pundit and he's been named a top influencer in social technology and marketing space by Forbes, entrepreneur, advertising agent, others. As a matter of fact, a 2014 Forbes article named Jason, one of 10 business leaders and entrepreneurs that you should follow on Twitter, along with in that same list, Jason was included to be named amongst Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, Tom Peters and Tony Shea, formerly of Zappos. Jason's the author of three books, WinFluence, reframing influencer marketing to ignite your brand, no bullshit social media and the rebels guide to email marketing. And I'm just thrilled to have somebody of Jason's caliber come and share his insights into this whole thing about influencer marketing, right? What is, what really is an influencer? You might be surprised by his answer and what's the future of, quote, influencers and having influence, right? And how can you perhaps in your business, your local market actually become an influencer? And again, not necessarily in the context that you think it might be. So we're going to put links in the show notes to all Jason's stuff, his books, his newsletter and a guy's just a wealth of knowledge and information. So I definitely encourage you to check those links, follow him, subscribe to his newsletter, check out the book of WinFluence or one of the other two books as well. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Jason, welcome to the show. Oh, great to be here, Jeff. Thanks for having me. It is an honor and a pleasure, sir. I saw you at social media marketing world. I don't know when that was 2019, maybe. Here's the time distortion post COVID, you know, but yeah, I wouldn't remember where it was either. I think back on the events that I've spoken at and I've been fortunate to speak it a lot of them. And you know, you meet a lot of people and see a lot of folks. And so I'm sure we met at somewhere along the line, but where and when I would have no recollection of. So I want to make sure we set this up properly. So you've written a couple of books if I am correct. Your most recent one is called Wind Fluence, reframing influencer marketing to ignite your brand. And my audience is mostly mortgage professionals, originators, loan office brokers, some real estate agents as well. Obviously you have heard this before when we think of the concept of influencer, you know what comes to mind for people, right? Yeah. He signed up lips. That's normally what people think of exactly, exactly. So how would you define influencer? What does that mean? Well, you know, most people certainly think of it very commonly as somebody who has a lot of followers on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube and they, you know, are the misperception I think is that they're very superficial and they're probably not worth investing in if you're a brand and you're trying to, you know, get the word out about stuff because they're, they're the peace on duck lips set, right? You know, they don't really pose, they live, they're living their best life. That's about all they got. But that is a very small sliver of the marketplace out there for content creators, which is kind of the new term for them because they're really good influencers that have real influence over their audiences and can persuade them to take action, which is my definition of what an influencer is, is anyone who can persuade an audience to take action. Those, those content creators are people who have worked very, very hard to accumulate an audience and do a good job of creating content that engages that audience over time and they have trust from that audience. So for instance, your podcast by default makes you an influencer because you have built an audience, the people who listen to this show trust you, they listen to you regularly because you bring good guests, good expertise, good perspective and you help them with their business. So if you were to be approached by a brand, it doesn't really matter what brand it is and said, hey, we'd like to partner with you because we have a message that we think would be relevant for your audience. So how can we collaborate with you to, you know, to communicate that? Now ideally, in a good influencer marketing, you know, approach from a company or a brand, they would come to you and they would collaborate, they would say, well, here's the messages we want to get across, here's what we want your audience to know, how would you best communicate that? And they would, you know, kind of, there'd be a back and forth there. It's not that the brand wants to just buy an ad and stick it in front of your audience. They really want to collaborate so that it's much more genuine and your body in on it because that's where the trust exchange happens. And so that superficial part of the influencer marketing world is a very small sliver. I would say probably maybe 10, 15% or the fashion beauty lifestyle folks who are the peace sign duck lips. The rest of it are incredible content creators who have captive audiences and they may be very small audiences or they may be very large, but they can persuade that audience to take action. And those are true influential people, people with influence. And so the kind of theme of the book is let's take the R off of that word and stop thinking about influencer marketing because that pushes us down a path, a preconceived notion of who we're talking to. And let's try to think about what we're trying to accomplish, which is achieving influence. We want to influence an audience to take action. So let's call it influence marketing and widen the guardrails a little bit and that sort of opens it up. It doesn't have to be even online. It can be anyone who can persuade an audience and I've got a clever little thing for your audience here in a minute, but I'll stop there and let you let you ask your next question. What's popping in my head, which is kind of one of those obvious questions or answers to that question is, can anybody be an influencer or have influence today? Absolutely. Should they be? Well, should they be is a different question, but anyone who puts themselves out there, who shares content, who posts anything on social media, but also who just gets involved in the community. And this is where I think a lot of your audience probably doesn't realize real estate agents, mortgage brokers. The one thing that this audience does more than anything is they network with people. They talk to a lot of people, they know a lot of people in the community. And from a local perspective, your audience is full of influencers. And the reason I say that is because a couple of years ago at Cornell, where my day job is I work at an ad agency during the day. And we developed an influencer program for a hospital health care system a couple of years ago. And we really wanted to engage the, you know, the local online influencers who had the food reviews and things like that, because we knew they had really good reach within our target audience. But we also wanted to use people who were influential in the community. So we got the mayor involved, we got the president of the urban league involved. And as we started to ask around and kind of look and see who really impacts a lot of people, we came up with two primary categories, dentists, doctors, real estate agents, right? Because people who in their day-to-day job come into contact with dozens of people in the community, add that up over a couple of months and you've got someone who impacts several hundred, if not thousands of people. And so our local influencers are not necessarily people who are on Instagram or TikTok, they're people who are doing their jobs in their day-to-day life. But obviously a lot of people don't think of themselves in that light. That's true. That's true. And, you know, when you're looking at the term influencer marketing, you know, brands are hiring people who have big followings online. In that context, it's hard to think of yourself as an influencer. But again, when you are a local business, you have a geographic footprint that's small and cohesive within a community. Then someone who has 400,000 followers on Instagram doesn't do you any good because less than 1% of their audience is actually going to be in the community, right? You need someone who impacts that community footprint. There's going to be some local bloggers and food reviewers and things like that that have an impact on that community. But the influential people, not influencers, but the influential people are going to be the music director at the local Presbyterian Church who's involved in all the local arts things. It's going to be the people who are involved with the Boys and Girls Club. It's going to be the president of the PTA. It's going to be a real estate agent who's really popular in town and involved in a lot of the civic community stuff. So you've got to look at influence rather than influencers, particularly if you're working on something for a local business because the online world, you know, the math doesn't work out. They're not going to hit your audience the way that you want them to. All right. So as a few things flowing through my head right here, I mean, some of the ideas that have been presented to agents, for example, and even mortgage brokers is, you know, this concept Gary V. You think made it famous digital mayor, right? And so what that looks like in the real world is like, hey, go interview local influential people, right in your community or in interview business owners and be the dude featuring the coffee shop and all that. And what's what I'm thinking about is I'm curious, A, what you think about those, but then I was also thinking so you have a choice in terms of if we're going to leverage these social media brands and let's just face it or platforms. If you're a real estate agent, I always tell them you're in a position that requires you to become well known, right? So the whole joke about the secret agent like the secret agent they don't survive, same with the mortgage broker. So it's either you become influential, right? Or you attach yourself to somebody who is that's yeah, that's absolutely that's pretty much the two sides of that coin. The whole digital mayor concept of you becoming influential and interviewing people in town or providing, creating some sort of content that people within your local community are going to thank you for, appreciate you for. That's probably the primary, you know, great idea. That's the personal brand that you give something to the community in the form of your content, your expertise, whatever you can share, whatever you know. And the thank you on the back end of that is that sort of inbound marketing when they're ready to buy what you sell or need what you do, they're going to come to you because you are the person of trust who has built that trust up over time. I would recommend that to anyone in any position at any time, as long as you're comfortable doing that because some people aren't comfortable doing live videos. Some people aren't comfortable doing podcasts, they're not comfortable posting pictures, writing things on Twitter. If you're not comfortable there, then it's not going to be a good place for you. And therefore you flip the coin and say, okay, how can I be of service to those people who are influential in my community or how can I do a guest little thing on their live stream or on their podcast just once, not all the time, so that I can get in front of the audience that they've accumulated. And when you look at it that way, using an influential third party person who has an audience to get in front of them, it's really not any different than old school media relations, public relations, right? You know, the tactics that we use to market in this industry, whether it's real estate or mortgage brokers 30 years ago where, well, it's right a guest column for the local business paper or, you know, let's do something to provide tips to the local TV station once a month and maybe sponsor a segment. Well, do the same thing with the influential people who are creating that highly relevant content locally and you're going to be in front of those audiences. Any more examples of what that looks like locally in the community. You know, I'm trying to think of examples where the mayor's one easy example to go to, but it's pretty hard to get, you know, time with the mayor. You know what I mean? But I'm thinking like, how many local business owners, if you will, you know, are becoming thought leaders, becoming these influential brands? I don't maybe you see more than I do, but I don't see a lot doing it. Well, I think we don't see a lot because we're just not looking in that direction. Because I think if you look at, if you pick out any random business, especially ones that are kind of the buzz is building about them in town and they're starting to, you hear their name a lot, go look at their Instagram feed, go look at their TikTok, go look at their Facebook, they're probably doing something to generate that buzz. There's a local, you know, women's clothing store in Lexington, Kentucky, just down the road. It's actually where Cornette is is in Lexington. I live in Louisville about an hour away, but there's a local clothing store there for women. And I see their content popping up all the time because a lot of the people I work with and a lot of the people I know in Lexington follow their feed. And so when they like that content, they comment on that content. It's going to pop up in my feed as a natural extension of that algorithm. And so I see that all the time. I don't necessarily follow that women's clothing store online because it's not my thing, right? I'm not a cross-dresser, I don't need that kind of stuff. But it's a top of mind kind of boutique for me if I want to buy something for my girlfriend or my mom or my daughter, right? So it's those kinds of opportunities. So for a real estate agent, it might be a little bit more challenging actually for the mortgage when you're a broker community. It's probably going to be a little bit easier. If you can approach someone like that and say, hey, why don't we, I bring some financial expertise to your show. Find an angle that makes what you know relevant to their audience. If they're women shopping for clothes, so they're shopping, they're spending money, right? There's going to be some angle that you can find to kind of wedge yourself in there and say, what if I came on your show, brought my wife or if you're a female, if what if I came into shop and in that experience, in that exchange, I give your audience some really good financial advice, whether it's refinancing their house or watching the financial markets or whatever it is. If you have a really good relationship with that boutique owner or develop one, that's going to give them better content. It's going to make their show more broad more appealing and make them more of a thought leader because they bring that expertise to their audience. That's interesting. One wouldn't think, and maybe this is only my limited belief here, but one wouldn't think that women's clothing would want to provide financial advice to their followers. I guarantee you, if the women's clothing boutique owner is married to a mortgage broker, that's going to happen. Now you've just got to find the ones. If your wife or your husband doesn't own the women's clothing store, find somebody who does and build a relationship with them and say, hey, let's help each other out. Maybe there's something for the audience that you're trying to build that a women's clothing boutique owner can bring to you. It's probably not going to be women's clothing. It might be, well, here's a financial situation that I attacked for my business and here's how it came out, but if you can work that tit for tat kind of thing, then you can share content and help each other out. Interesting. Let's transition and talk about, I love that you feature Robert Chaldini in your book, The Six Principles of Influence. This is appropriate. We're all trying to influence at some level. It just depends on what version of this that we're talking about. Where do you think, I mean reciprocity, we already talked about that, and I think conceptually people get that, but are you pretty well versed on this, I assume, because it's in your book. I'll try to remember it all, but yeah, I think I can hang with you. Do you want me to run through them? I don't want to put you on the spot. I know the reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking, and consensus. He's added a seventh, though, now he's trying to confuse us because he's got a new version of the book out, and he's changed him up a little bit. I don't have the seven memorized. He altered one or two of them and added another one, but they're mostly tied to the consensus authority. They're just variations of the theme. Well, let's define these then. We know what reciprocity is, and I don't know, did these go in the order of, like I see in your book, reciprocity, scarcity, or does the order matter? Let's just talk. The order doesn't matter for me, really, but we know what reciprocity is. It's, you know, you give to get advice versions, which is, by the way, I don't want to gloss over that, but to your point about sharing content and all that kind of stuff, that's extremely valuable. Oh, yeah. And if you go back 15 years when social media was basically Twitter, and I guess it was my space, but that was a little obnoxious. But back in the early days of Twitter, and you know, O607 around and there, the way that you built social media credibility was you shared good content on Twitter. You found good YouTube videos and shared links. You found blog posts and shared links. I mean, my whole Twitter, I literally wrote down a Twitter strategy and tacked it to my bullet and board back in at Doe Anderson in 2006. I think it was. And it said Twitter strategy shared good stuff. And that was my, that was my whole strategy. And I wound up with 100,000 followers or whatever, just because I shared good content. Right. Right. And so yeah, that reciprocity is a big one. And that's still true today. Share good content. Yeah. I mean, sharing content has become a little bit more challenging on some of these networks. You don't, you don't really share content on Instagram the way you would. And you could do it in stories a little bit easier now. And they've added the ability to add links to stories. But, you know, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are just, you can share links all day. And it's really good stuff. And it helps you build your credibility there. Right. And of course, we know, you know, this probably better than I, like sharing these links to outside platforms, Facebook in particular, doesn't like that. So they're going to suppress. Right. Let's keep you in the metaverse. So to speak. Yeah. Yeah. They like to, they like to keep you on on platform. So you kind of have to be smart about it. If you really want to share a YouTube video, you got to try to find the Facebook version of it or whatever. But, you know, sometimes it's just, let's just put it out there. And if the algorithm favors me great fine, if it doesn't, that's okay. But if you do great content consistently, the algorithm is going to favor you, right? Because you're, you're the people who follow you are going to look for you. If they don't see you in the feed, they're going to come find you. All right. So I told you this is going to be totally organic. So what about Facebook organic? There's particularly business pages dead, dead without paying for it. Oh, yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. You're, you're, you're lucky. If you have a thousand followers, you're lucky. If ten, see your content, if you're not putting your personal image. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the game we're playing. All right. Um, scarcity. Yeah. What do I mean? Okay. So in the context of, of the book, what, the way that I explained these six is through an influencer who tried to launch her own clothing line and it failed. Right. And so I went back and looked at, okay, what did she do or not do? That looking at the Chaudini six principles of persuasion. What, where did she drop off? Where did she fail? And so the scarcity one was she just said, okay, my store is open. Here's all my apparel. Go buy it. Oops. Sorry. Go buy it. There was never a, the idea of scarcity is, you know what? I'm going to launch this store on Friday, but I'm only selling this one item to the first 100 customers. So you need to be the first 100. If you create that air of scarcity, this is going to sell fast. There's only 10 of them, etc. Now all of a sudden, there's a psychological trigger in your audience that says, ooh, I better get there on time. I better be first. I better, you know, go do that. And so she just opened up, you know, the shop and said, here's a thousand items of everything. Go buy them. And nobody had any motivation to want to go buy them because, oh, if I don't go buy them today, it's okay. They'll be there tomorrow. There's plenty of. So creating that air of scarcity motivates your audience to act. Yeah, because people want what they can't have. They don't want to miss out all that kind of stuff. Fear of loss. Interesting. And I know there's, there's some examples for my listeners where they could use that where they have limited availability on their calendar, for example, you know, consultations on a limited basis, or I know a lot of my listeners like they teach classes and, you know, maybe you to get in this class, you have to achieve a certain level of production. There's lots of different ways to structure that. All right, back to your case studies. So she was wide open. So she was, it was just like, it's always going to be there whatever we can do whatever we want. Authority. All right, tell us about that. So authority is, you know, it kind of goes back to that reciprocity when you're building your brand and you're building that sort of, you know, the the mayor, you know, of the internet or the mayor of content for you, the mayor approach. When you do that and you offer up really good expertise in whatever, you know, vertical, whatever topic is your sort of forte, you're building authority, you're establishing yourself as a thought later, you're establishing a level of trust with your audience. If you don't do that, like this young lady was in the fashion space and she opened up her own apparel brand, but all of her content really prior to launching was just her in a nice outfit with, you know, chilling out emoji, emoji, emoji as the content. There was no fashion tips. Here's, here's what I think about the latest styles. There was no sort of academic establishment of why I should trust her for my fashion ideas. It was pretty picture, pretty picture, pretty picture, pretty picture. Now there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're trying to turn your influence or your audience into customers, you have to give them a reason to want to buy from you. This young lady is just throwing up pretty pictures and she's going to keep doing that no matter what. That's what her audience watches her feed for. They don't watch her feed for fashion tips or makeup tips or the newest styles or the reaction to the newest styles. So there's no authority in her. She's, you know, she's a model and that's the extent of it. If she had shared expertise consistently over time, which consistency is the next one. If she had built that up consistently over time and become an authority in fashion and style and then launched a fashion brand. Now, all of a sudden it's like, oh, I'm going to buy from her because she, I trust her. She's authoritative and she's been that way for a long time. And so those two are checked off authority consistency. I'm going to buy from her. Yeah. A lot of applicable use cases for my listeners for sure content and makes me think of listing agents or real estate agents who just post listings all the time, new listing, new listing, new listing. It's just pictures of homes, you know, without them taking time to establish, you know, their knowledge and authority around buying and selling real estate. Missing out on that. And then of course, consistently showing up. We know that. Okay. So next one is liking. Yeah. Liking is one of those that I always have to remind myself what that is because like, well, people like you, they like you, right? But that's really what it is. It's sort of about, you know, do, do, do people do you do things that make people like you? You know, are you a nice person? Are you, you know, someone who, and it kind of, all these kind of weave together, are you giving to get? Are you providing value? Are you being consistent with that? You know, are, are you someone that is likable? Is there, is there a likability to what you do and how you interact with people? And so if you have that, then that's not the only thing that's going to turn an audience member into a customer, but it's certainly going to help, you know, sort of grease that path for the, the audience member to become a customer. You want to do business with people that you like, that you know, that you trust. And that's, you know, one of the important parts there. We're about to get a visitor here on the, on the podcast. My cat just jumped up on the desk. Oh, cool. Well, is the cat likable? The cat is right now. She's, he's not likable because he's messing around with my wires. But if I grab him, it's going to make a, a mess. So I just kind of got to let him go. As long as he's not chewing through the wires. Yeah. If he starts chewing on stuff, I may have to, may have to grab him. Well, that's all we love about these. So last one is consensus. What does that mean? Yeah, consensus is, is really that sort of, you know, the, the quality of having multiple sources point to you as the, the place to go. And so it's like, you can be as consistent with your content. You can establish authority. You know, you can have the reciprocity and the liking. The scarcity is really more of a product centric kind of thing. But consensus is do other people tell the audience that you are trustworthy, that you are someone you should be able to buy from because there's not an influencer out there whose audience only comes to that influencer. They go to lots of other people in that vertical in that space. And those other people need to reinforce the fact that you are a relevant voice in that, in that conversation. And so that's why you see, you know, people like us, we go to marketing conferences and we network and whatnot because I'm going to, you know, be on, on your show. You're going to be on my show. And so within our two audiences, there's consensus that we are authoritative. And if you do that over the course of dozens of dozens of other people, now all of a sudden you've got a consensus within the marketplace that you're a trusted resource. And of course, consensus is what other people say about you, as you said, and in the online world today, that's reviews, online reviews, word of mouth, client testimonials, you know, so many different ways to think about this. You know, it's funny. And in talking through this, I've never actually, although I know Chaldini read his book years ago, I've never actually sat here and put the pieces of the puzzle together that if anybody's listening to this right now, that that literally is a looking at your graphic in the book. And of course, we'll link all this up in the show notes. That is the menu for how to grow your influence. Duh. Here he is. Here with the cat, pesky cat. The cat is very influential. Yeah, I mean, you're right. And the chapter in the book, I literally, I almost second-guessed myself when I was writing about this young lady, because I literally took her Instagram feed and her online presence through each of these six. And unfortunately, she didn't really do any of them. You know, she was, she was likable, certainly, with her content. She was consistent with her content, but she wasn't consistent with building the authority, et cetera, things like that. And she certainly didn't use any of this sort of sales tricks, like scarcity and whatnot, to present this opportunity. So it's a really good, I think it really drills in and shows you, this is how to build real influence, not just a bunch of followers online, which is what she had. That's a key difference, by the way, because you said earlier, she's just posting, posting, posting, but yeah, not, and I've been guilty of that, too, and actually struggle with that sometimes, like trying to figure out who's my brand, how do I want to show up in the world, right? But also, it's both art and science, I think, you know, maybe that's the struggle of a creator. Like they don't, they just want to create, they don't want to think like, oh gosh, I better sell something, you know, like most artists are starving. Sure. Well, and that's, it's a great point because, you know, the people who are outstanding on, let's say, Instagram or TikTok are creators, they're content creators, right? They create good art, they create good photography, good design, they produce good videos. The difference between someone who stops there and is successful as a quote unquote influencer online creator is someone who also has business sense to turn all of that into real influence, to be able to motivate people to buy a product, try a product, take action. What's wrong with influencer marking today, and what do you hope changes? Man, there's, I've got a list probably. I think you'd take up another hour or worth the, worth the show. I think really right now what's wrong with influencer marketing is we still have a lot of brands who look at influencers as an advertising channel. They see, when they see, okay, it's going to cost me $2,000 to have a post on this influencer's Instagram feed. They think of that in terms of the same terms they think of a paper click ad or an online media buy or a billboard or a TV. They think, okay, let's see, this person's got 100,000 followers. It's going to cost me $2,000 to do that. That's a $20 CPM, so that's a pretty good rate for me. What that does is it completely disregards the influencer's time. It completely disregards the influencer's talent. It completely disregards their ability to create content that engages those 100,000 people or some percentage of those 100,000 people. The biggest problem right now is brands still don't see influencers as contractors, freelancers, people who are earning a living, creating content that you need and that you want and that you value. They're still looking at them as just an advertising channel that they can throw money at. When brands start to see influencers like freelancers, if you go out and hire a graphic designer, you're not going to ask them to work for an exchange of product. You're going to say, I value your time, I value the designs you do, how much do you charge? Let's agree upon a payment structure for that. That's how you have to treat influencers because they are, in essence, freelancers that are capable of creating content just for you. You can engage them to do that too. They just happen to also have an audience with them that allows you to reach a certain number of people through their creative vision that brings your brand or your message to life for their audience in a relevant way. That's the biggest problem with influencer marketing right now. Secondarily to that, well, actually probably primary to primary problem from other people's perspective. That's the one that I deal with because I'm dealing with the nuts and bolts every day of doing influencer marketing. But there is still a huge pay gap in influencer marketing between whites and non-white creators and men and women. In some verticals, women far out earn men. But when you look at the per post price in most verticals, men still earn more. That's the byproduct of patriarchy and institutional racism that applies, which we're all dealing with and we're all becoming more educated about. That is something that is not endemic to influencer marketing. It's endemic to everything. But it's certainly manifesting itself there. That's interesting. I remember listening to your podcast about that. You guys had all the data on the different platforms. It's very interesting to see. I think if I remember correctly, was it on TikTok that the women are out earning? Yeah, it's actually TikTok and Instagram both per post women are out earning men. It's on YouTube where the men kind of trump everything. But I will say the interesting thing is about 83% of all quote unquote influencers who make money are women. So in total, women are far exceeding the earning potential of men. But when it's a one-to-one comparison, men typically make more money, which they probably shouldn't. Fair enough. All right. Just about to wrap up here. I'm just back to your book. I just put a cap on that whole influence thing. We just talked about types of impact. Four types of impact persuasion, consideration, exploration and information. Why I paused on this is because I have bought things off of Instagram because of influencers. Yeah. Products, right? Oh, yeah. Because you follow somebody and how many listening have already done the same thing. The question I wanted to ask you this, I guess, to we might close out on this. But what about the issue of an influencer is rep in a product, which you and I'm thinking some of the nutritional products I've bought, for example, where you say to yourself, come on, dude. You're really using that. You're just getting paid. How do you deal with that? That's one that we're always going to have that. Because if you turn on the home shopping network or QVC or whatever, you're going to get that. That's always going to be there. I think from a brand perspective, if you're reaching out to influencers, I think you just have to be really thorough in vetting who you're going to reach out to, really consume and study their content, know how they treat sponsored content so that you can say, this person just doesn't seem very genuine. And if they don't, then they're not a good influencer for you. You want to work with people who, A, have a set of standards. Like, look, I'm not going to rep your product unless I like it. So I have to try it first. And I need to be educated and you need to give me lots of background and assets and whatnot so I can figure out if I do like it first. If they give you that out of the gate, they're probably going to be pretty good to work with, especially if they like your product. And if they don't, they're a great source of feedback, but obviously you don't want to engage them for an influencer thing because they're not going to be honest with, if they are honest with their audience, it's not good for you if they don't like your product. So you just have to be really diligent about picking the right influencers if you're on that side of things. If you're a consumer and you're on the outside, you're going to trust the influencers who are more transparent, who are more genuine about the products that they do rep. And so everybody has their own filter and you're going to believe some people and not believe others. And so I think that's to each their own. There's going to be a number of people out there, whether it's the coupon clippers or the the gullible or whatever, there's always going to be an audience for those people who are just chills. But for you personally, you're going to trust who you trust based on how you react to their content. So just keep that in mind. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm thinking of the one influencer in particular that I've purchased from and the funny thing about it is he so rarely even speaks. It's always just those video clips of him like doing different things, workout related or whatever. And then it's just like, you know, there's the thing, the product, the whatever. And you know, I've definitely had some DMs with him and all that kind of stuff. But I'm looking at back to the influence thing. It's just like, okay, all you do is like work out on video. You know what I mean? You've got some authority there, but there's not a lot of liking. There's a little bit of consensus lacking because there's nobody else saying anything about him. Right. It's funny. It's a little bit of self study here. But there's also that psychological, you know, thing in there of aspiration, right? That person's working out and you like the fact that they are obviously fit. They look good. They feel good. You know, you can you're getting inspired by this workout. And so you aspire to be like them. And so when they stop and go, I use these vitamin pills. You know, I get me the vitamin pills. Sweet. You'll have six pack abs if you take these vitamins. All right, man. This is a fun conversation. Let's close it out this way. What is the future of influencer marketing? Because I think some people still, you know, question it, whatever, what's what's the future? Is it here to stay? I think I definitely think it is. And the reason it is is because we just live in a signal to noise ratio world. And right now, the signal is, you know, content creators who have, you know, the ability to capture the attention of people online, create compelling content and engage them around it. And that's not just the territory of the big media companies anymore. It's the territory of anyone who can plug into the internet, create good content. There's a lot of people, most people are plugging in and creating content. The vast majority of them are horrible at it and boring and we don't want to, you know, it's just noise. But the ones that stand out, those are your influencers, those are your influential people, the people who are collecting an audience around something. And so I really think they are here to stay. I think you're going to start to see more and more brands and agencies realize that a TikTok influencer, which is a perfect example, is a unique content creator. They create something different that at agency creatives don't really create marketing. People don't really create. I think you're going to see a lot more of those online content creators get hired full time at agencies and brands to just create content for them. I think you're going to start to see it become a, you know, sort of ubiquitous within brands and agencies. We've got this, you know, social media content creation team over here. And it's not just your traditional art directors and copywriters. It's actually, you know, digital natives, stars of TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and whatnot. I really see that becoming, you know, more of a thing in the future. But I also see brands getting more sophisticated about partnering with influencers in relevant ways. Instead of doing the sponsor post one off at a time, having an influencer that there's a good Venn diagram overlap with your audiences. And you say, you know what? I want to partner with you for the next five years. And I just want to make sure that at some point your audience immediately looks at my brand and goes, yes. So cause I do that. We're in a world now where if my teenager comes to me, you know, we have the talk, we were mentioned, you know, going off to college, but the teenager says, nope, I want to be an influencer. Like, there's a pretty good chance your kids going to make a lot more money than you are if they're good at it. So encourage that. Yes. Like it's, I mean, if they, if you can see that they have a passion for it and they have some degree of knack of talent of creating compelling content, maybe not for you, but their age group, you know, see what they're doing and see how people are reacting to it. Fan those flames, man, I think we should be teaching influencer marketing skills, content creator skills in elementary school for crying out loud. I mean, you literally have, I talked, I interviewed for a piece I'm writing for entrepreneur. I interviewed a 17 year old girl two weeks ago. She started making slime videos on Instagram when she was 14 years old. Her company is now worth a couple million dollars. And she's in college now. Right. Her parents wanted to be a doctor or lawyer. And she said, you know, after I showed them, you know, the first real quarter of earnings from selling slime through my Instagram videos, they shut up about being a doctor. They're like, Oh, okay, we'll just get out of here right now. Do your thing, honey. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, listen, this is a fantastic, really fascinating topic as well, this whole influencer thing. Before we go, of course, we want to allow people to connect with you. What I just realized, just don't on me, because I'm looking at the books you've written besides the one we just mentioned, which will put links in the show notes. Once again, that is win-fluence. But the other two books, dude, that just hit me. You wrote the Rebels Guide to email marketing and no bullshit social media. And I was like, Holy shit, I've read those books, man. That's awesome. Thank you. I did write those. Yeah. I wrote those with DJ Waldo and Eric Decker, respectively. And had a good time. That was back in the days when, you know, we were all still trying to figure out social media and, you know, Eric and I were out there early on with we should be talking about how to use this strategically instead of just joining the conversation. Yeah. And the book did really well. And then DJ and I wrote the Rebels Guide to email marketing. He's the more the email marketing guy. I just kind of brought the flavor to it, I guess. And yeah, both of those books were a lot of fun. Yeah, for sure. All right. So for people who, you also have a podcast, real quickly, tell us the name of the podcast. It's also wind fluids. It's wind fluids. The influencer marketing podcast or the, I'm sorry, the influence marketing podcast. And yeah, twice a week, I do a commentary on Mondays and then I interview somebody from the from the industry on Thursdays. And it's a fun show. Come, come join in and listen. So the best place to obviously we'll put links, I said, like I said, regarding the books, probably just to the Amazon, you know, links here or best place would be for people to connect with you. Go to your website. Where do you want to send them? Jason Falls dot com will give you a menu to find everything. The book, the podcast, my other podcast digging deeper, which I do for a cornette, which is more of a marketing strategy interview show. Everything's there. Jason Falls dot com. Awesome. Hey, man. Appreciate you making time today. Thanks for having me. This has been great. Awesome. Awesome. Hey, everybody listening. You know what to do. If you like this episode, hey, leave us a review. Appreciate you. We'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Hey, guys, what's up? Real quick. You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before. And I just want to quickly remind you of that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchased loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. Our mortgage marketing pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling. 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