If you have ever wanted to know how to successfully use influencer marketing to help you grow your business, this is the podcast for you!

Kayla Houlihan is the founder of Tribe Skincare, a skincare range especially for sensitive skin that prides itself on being Australian, Vegan, cruelty-free and natural. Their business has been going from strength to strength, thanks in no small part to some very clever social media marketing strategies – most notably, successfully using social media influencers to promote their products.

If you are a product-based and/or e-commerce business wondering how you leverage influencer marketing to grow, you’re in luck because Kayla is super transparent about her strategies and exactly what she has done to succeed.

In this interview, Kayla and I chat about some of her most recent influencer marketing wins, and the remarkable impact that they have had on her business.

So, let’s dive in!

Listen On: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Here’s what we cover:

• Which social media channels to focus on as a product business.
• How to approach influencers to work with your brand.
• What you need to be asking influencers before working with them.
• The influencer briefing process and how to make sure you are getting the right content.
• The importance of giving influencers creative control.
• The effectiveness of video in influencer marketing campaigns.
• How to work with major influencers, and the significant impact that it can have on your business.
• The importance of having a sales funnel to make the most out of your social media and influencer marketing efforts.
• The importance of optimising your website for conversion before engaging influencers, and how to do it.
• The step by step process Tribe Skincare use to run successful influencer marketing campaign.
• How to use Facebook advertising and remarketing to generate additional sales from an influencer marketing campaign.
• How to tell if an influencer’s followers / engagement is fake.
• And honestly? Much, much more.

Enjoy!

• Tribe Skincare: 
  • Instagram: instagram.com/tribeskincare
  • Website: tribeskincare.com.au
• The Course Cartel:
  • Instagram: instagram.com/the.course.cartel
  • Facebook: facebook.com/thecoursecartel
  • Free eBook: thecoursecartel.com/ebook

Transcript

STEVIE: Hey guys, and welcome to Episode 7 of The Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot Podcast. If you have ever thought about working with influences for your business, this is absolutely the episode for you. I interviewed KAYLA HOULIHAN a couple of days ago and she is the lovely founder of Tribe Skincare which is a skincare brand for sensitive skin. 

And she’s gone really all in on social media but influencer marketing in particular to market her range. And honestly, it’s seen her go from strength to strength. I had to get her on the podcast when she talked about a racing win that she had with her first major influence a marketing campaign so she’ll go into a little bit more detail around this spot the campaign was a wild success. She ended up with 3000 visitors to the website, more orders than she knew what to do with 110,000 views on the video on the influences page and honestly, more business than you know what to do with is a pretty good problem to have. 

Right? So Kayla was amazing in terms of being really open with exactly how she runs her influencer marketing and I think there’s so much that business owners whether you’re thinking about diving in or you’ve sort of given it a go but you haven’t really had the results that you wanted to. There’s so much to learn in this episode around all things influencer marketing. So Kayla takes us through the step by step process and tries visas for running a successful influencer marketing campaign. 

Exactly what she does in terms of approaching influences to work with her brand what she asks them the briefing process, the importance of giving influences creative control, the importance of a sales funnel to make the most out of your campaigns and honestly guys much, much more. This is one that if you’re a product-based business or even if you’re a service-based business looking to see how influencer marketing can work for your business, you’re going to want to listen. Let’s go. So I’m super excited today to be interviewing Kayla Houlahan from tribe skincare. 

Hi, Kayla. 

KAYLA: Hi, how are you? 

STEVIE:  I’m so excited to be interviewing you today. Because I feel when it comes to social media, there are so many articles out there and people that tell you how to do particular things without actually practically giving, I guess other people’s experiences and you’ve had a massive win. So super keen to have a chat about that today. 

KAYLA: Definitely sounds good. 

STEVIE: So what I thought we’d start with so Kayla basically has a is the founder of an amazing sensitive skin skincare range called Tribe Skincare. So, Kayla, you’re the best person to have a chat, I guess around where it all started where you’re at now. And yeah, maybe a little bit about sort of your recent wins as well. 

KAYLA: Absolutely. I’ll start with the brand story. So it all sort of comes about from another business that I have, which is a beauty salon. And my sister and I run that together. And we were looking for a skincare range having a salon that was specifically for sensitive skin. 

But there was really nothing out there on the market. And we both have sensitive skin ourselves. So it made sense. So we were using particular ingredients on asking, personally and then we wanted to develop a range that our clients could use at the salon. And then also go to Australia wide with it. 

STEVIE: So this amazing 

KAYLA: Is all on anti-inflammatory skincare. So we use ingredients Aloe Vera, zinc, Rosie Boyle, everything to rebuild the skin, and a huge focus on reducing facial redness. And I guess what was really important to us in a skincare brand is that it follows the four values, which is Australian made natural ingredients, vegan and cruelty-free. So we wanted the brand to be all for both things. And that’s what we have achieved with it. 

STEVIE: Amazing. And I’ve actually kind of I know we’ve worked together just recently, but I’ve been following your story. Pretty much since I started in the same Facebook group that we’re in, which is like-minded beaches, drinking wine, and you have honestly just gone from strength to strength. And I’m so proud of you. So congratulations. 

KAYLA: Thank you, it’s nice to share the journey as well with other business owners, because we’ve got this social media where we’re appealing to the customers, and then it’s nice to have kind of on the back end have other business people to talk to about the business side of everything. 

STEVIE:  100%. And I think one thing that you do really well, it’s a bit of an aside, but you’re very supportive of other people as well. So in terms of, you obviously share your business wins and things inside that group, but then you stay supportive of other people that are doing well and just such a supporter. So I think that’s really cool. I think we need more people like you.

KAYLA: Definitely. It’s good to spread the love.

STEVIE: Totally. So what I’m keen to talk to you about. Number one is just social media generally, I mean, it’s obviously such an important marketing channel for any e-commerce business. 

So Keynes, kind of, I guess, have a chat about what you have done in the past, just generally, with social media, whether it’s a big focus for you, and kind of what sort of been working generally, 

KAYLA: Definitely. So social media would be the number one marketing strategy that I’m using. And instead of spreading myself across all platforms, I’ve got a really huge focus on Facebook and Instagram. They were just platforms, I kind of knew inside out already. And I know that the customers are on those platforms. So I think a lot of business owners think I need a YouTube channel, I need to be on Pinterest, and I need to be doing all these things. But you can just completely overwhelm yourself. 

STEVIE: Yes, 

KAYLA: I think it’s very important to keep social media platforms that work really well for your business. And then these have essentially become my marketing strategies. So it’s virtually the only marketing I’m doing. I also do email marketing. 

STEVIE: Yeah, 

KAYLA: I think social media has become the first touchpoint for the same funnel. So I use them as traffic generation, 

STEVIE: that’s such a good point around just kind of picking one or two when you know that your target audience is hanging out. It’s so easy to get distracted by all the shiny things and kind of if somebody is talking about Pinterest, and it’s the big thing, feeling you need to be on there and just spreading yourself too thin and kind of not really getting anything done at all. 

KAYLA: Absolutely, yeah. So much information out there saying you need to be doing this on this platform. on YouTube, and it’s just completely overwhelming. 

STEVIE: Yeah, and I think it’s a great point as well. You’ve mentioned sales funnels. So I always say that social media in terms of where it seeds is a conversation starter rather than a deal closer. 

So it’s very much kind of all about, you start relationships on social media, because it’s where the attention is, and people are hanging out. But it’s so important than to funnel them off social media into your email or your website or public on that UIN to continue the relationship. 

KAYLA: Definitely, I think a lot of people struggle with understanding what a sales funnel leads to. And I think the most important my I think of it is, that’s your first. And the endpoint for an e-commerce business is checking out. 

So from your touchpoint of social media, you need to think about how you’re going to filter them through onto your website, through your pages to your checkout to become a paying customer. And that’s the end of the sales funnel again, 

STEVIE: 100%. And how do you do that in your business? 

KAYLA: So again, we’re using social media as traffic generation, often with influences posting about the products. The reason we do that is just to leverage off other people’s following because we are new brands, we don’t have a huge following yet. So when using other Instagram accounts with a big following, 

KAYLA: And come over to our page, hopefully, like it, hopefully click on the website link. And now we’ve really optimized the website for conversions. So then from there, they click through and Go to the checkout and become hopefully a lifetime customer. Yes, that is the end goal. Definitely. That’s a really, really good point around. So I often have a lot of clients that come to me and they want to dive into social media. 

And they’re kind of starting with what I post, which obviously, is important, but I always say as a new business, when you don’t have a following yet, you can be posting the most amazing content, but nobody’s finding it. There’s no way for people to kind of come over and see you. And I guess that’s kind of, I guess, diving into why I was so excited about interviewing you today because you have just had a big win with an influencer campaign. 

And I’m super Keen. And I know that all of the listeners will be super came to have a chat about your influence a marketing strategy in general, but also in particular, in terms of the most recent one that he had, which I think had a really great result if he didn’t end. So I think the important thing is we didn’t just dive straight into using a huge influencer with over half a million followers. Because when you are using a major influencer, you’re going to be paying quite a substantial fee to appear on their Instagram. 

So we started small, we’ve used to migrate influencers that post for free product, then we’ve progressed to influences that might charge a few hundred dollars, and then you can progress to your major influences that are going to charge a substantial fee. But before you delve into that you need to have your sales funnel perfectly mapped out and in place so that you’re going to get a good return when you are investing a lot of money. 

STEVIE: Very clever.So important. Yeah. What would you call them micro? What do you call them micro-influencer?

KAYLA: I guess someone with 10,000 or fewer followers? 

STEVIE: Yeah. 

KAYLA: And some businesses have huge success with micro-influencers and get a really good return. And then we’ve done price with micro-influencers where we’ve maybe got one or two page likes from it. So it really depends who you’re using, and who is following them as well. 

STEVIE: Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between a social media influencer and then a person who has genuine influence whether they’re a micro-influencer, or they’ve got a bigger following. 

And that’s something I think that it’s really important for people to be careful because there are a lot of people out there that have a following, but they aren’t necessarily number one, your target audience or necessarily people that are ever going to buy from you. Yeah. Is that something that you found in your experience as well? 

KAYLA: Absolutely. So we’ve now started asking the influences to send through this stuff, which most of them will have stats on their back end. And that tells us the demographics, we want to say how many females are following them. Because if they’ve got no 

STEVIE: So important 

KAYLA: Yeah, 60% of their followers, a male, we’ve already lost out 60% of whatever fee we’re paying. So we want female followers. And they can also tell you, their countries. So we like to work with Australian influences with Australian following because we only sell in Australia. 

And now we’ve just added a few international countries based on the influences, they show us what countries also following them. And then we’ve added those countries to our website now so that they can also purchase from us 

STEVIE: amazing, that’s actually a really good point you’ll find, especially kind of in the health and fitness and also the beauty industry, there will be a lot of influences out there that have a really healthy following and even greater engagement. 

But it might be because they’ve got guys kind of following them because they think they look great in a bikini or something along those lines, and then never going to be the people that actually kind of buy from you. So I think it’s really important to get those stats, 

KAYLA: Definitely. And people always ask me how I know what influence it is going to work for my brand. And it is all a gamble. But you can definitely take the risk out of it by looking at things like the demographic. And then you can kind of predict a little bit of what return you’re going to get or how many of those customers are within your demographic.

STEVIE: Totally. So how do you go about kind of when you very first decide what you’re going to approach somebody what do you do? How do you go about it? 

KAYLA : Yeah, I keep it very, very casual. I’m not sure if that’s the right way to do it. But it’s definitely 

STEVIE: Nobody is liking the screen, Yeah, 

KAYLA: I guess it’s really important to remember when you’re dealing with an influencer. Everything is about them, not about you and your brand. So yeah, message influencer, I talked about them  I’ve seen your content, I love that you do these particular kinds of posts would really love to collab with you. 

Would you be interested in me sending me some free products for you to try because they will always want to try your products before they commit to any kind of collaboration  By just the way you word, make it very clear that it is about them and their followers not about your brand? 

The customer is always the hero. And yeah, just keep it casual, informal. Make sure your mentor mentioned the words sponsored or paid if you are working with a major influencer. Otherwise, they’re just going to kind of brushed right over it and move on to the name brands. 

STEVIE: So you contacting them via Instagram direct message, or do you generally email, 

KAYLA: I will email if that’s an option. So a lot of them will have their email in their bio, or if they’re set up as a business, they have the little Email button on their page. So wherever possible, I email, I just think it’s a bit more professional, and shows that you’re that little bit more serious about working with them. If the only option is to DM them, then I’ll dm them 

STEVIE: Yup. And so what’s your strike rate? Do you kind of have a hit list of people that you’ve kind of been following for a while and think could bea good fit for your brand. And you approach a whole heap of them and hear that from my land set and percentage? Sure. How does this kind of work in terms of people coming back to you, 

KAYLA: I find, we do hear back from the majority of them, which is apparently quite rare. A lot of people do say that they send out all these messages, and they don’t really even hear back. But I think what’s important to remember is this one particular influencer, your messaging, they haven’t requested your email or message, so they’re not really obliged to reply to you. 

So you can’t get too upset with them or the situation if they haven’t replied. But yeah, we’ve got a good rate. I think definitely because we show we keep it casual, but we definitely show that we’re professional, we understand they have rights, we understand they need a brief and that sort of thing. We make that very clear from the beginning. 

And we just make our four key brand values very clear as well about the Aussie natural and all of that, because they want to work with brands that have values that coincide, I would say values and what their followers were like. So we find here is usually really great, great way of getting a response and getting them over the line. Yeah. 

STEVIE: And I think that just comes back to you have done a really good job about picking the right people from the outset, and really choosing people that 

KAYLA: Yeah, 

STEVIE: the right target market, and that, a really good fit in terms of your product. So one thing that I would say when it is sort of coming to approaching influences and hearing back and it’s a tip that I got from Daniel Lewis, who owns the influencer agency called Scrunch, she basically uses a three to one role. 

So for every three people that are contacted, kind of expected that you’ll hear that from one or you’ll get a yes from one. So that can also be kind of a good rule of thumb to look at as well. 

KAYLA: Yeah, absolutely. 

STEVIE: So in terms of the briefing process. So you’ve got an influencer? That’s kind of Yes, I’m going to come on board. What’s the next step? What do you do is kind of stick to it. 

KAYLA: So we will usually before they even commit to coming on board, we’ve already started conversing with them, we’ve sent them two products to try. And we go straight into a brief because we know exactly what we want. So usually, when discussing a brief, we use video content with influences because it just works really well for our product, because it’s visual. 

And so we go straight into we want a video, you’re always going to pay about 25% more for video on top of that fee. And then yeah, we just we usually send them examples of other influences work that we want them to kind of recreate with their own style. I think it helps in that strike rate a lot as well because they can see that we have already worked with other influences. 

STEVIE: Yeah, 

KAYLA: and then we just go over the brief of what we need on our end. And then we always give them creative direction on their end as well. Because at the end of the day, it is their page and they’re following, and they need to feel comfortable with the content that they put on there. 

STEVIE: You’re nailing it, Kayla, so this is pretty much textbook exactly what you need to be doing in terms of influences. It’s so important. Number one to have a brief and most influences really appreciate as much, I guess, guidance on what you’re thinking as possible because it’s so easy to interpret things differently. 

So a really clear brief is so important. But then also keeping in mind that Yeah you’re contacting someone that has their own following. And they have that following because they’re producing content that their target audience is interested in. So you need to be giving them the creative leeway to do what they do best. 

KAYLA: Definitely that’s great. 

STEVIE: Yeah, let’s have a chat about the influences that you’ve just engaged, which is Brittany Saunders. Is that right?

KAYLA: Yeah. So she’s the first, I guess, major influencer, we’ve worked with.

STEVIE: Yeah. So tell me about that. Because that was obviously a really exciting Win for you last week. 

KAYLA: Yeah, absolutely. It’s led to a very chaotic week following. Definitely in a good way. 

STEVIE: So what was the outcome? What happened? So obviously, the first went live? And then you just got a whole heap of orders? And you follow his and? Yeah, 

KAYLA: absolutely. So we’ve done now over two months of our average sales in the last four or five days. So it’s bags full of craziness. 

STEVIE: Crazy. 

KAYLA: Yeah, we found it’s really it’s quite a brand on the map. We’ve had so many wholesale inquiries, so many new customers, and also a few other influences who previously hadn’t responded. When I’ve sent them through Brittney video and said, we’ve worked in Brittney Saunders. I’m now getting responses from a lot of other major influences. So I think this is really kind of opens up the floodgates, and we can go pretty next level from here. 

STEVIE: So exciting. 

KAYLA: Yeah, definitely. 

STEVIE: And so how did that? How did that come about? So obviously, did you just contact her just as you would contact sort of anyone else you’d be looking to work with? or How did it work in terms of that?

KAYLA: We’ve been engaging with Brittany’s content for quite a few months now. So you can see commenting on her videos and post and telling her we love her content, which we genuinely do. And then she has recently launched a swimwear brand. So we just sent her an email saying congrats on the launch of your swimwear. It’s all looking amazing. 

So excited for you, we would love for you to try our products and see if you’re interested in doing a collaboration. And then, so the next touchpoint, especially with major influence, they will be very clear that they need to love your product first, with your kind of, they’re probably going to post regardless. Because they’re trying to get that following up. They want to be reposted on your page, but the kind of major influences, they really want to promote what they love. So send her through the products. And she gave us feedback off just a couple of days saying I’m really loving the products they work so well with my skin, I’m definitely happy to consider a collaboration. And then in her term, she wanted to use the skincare for one month prior to filming the video. So that was, I guess, a reflection of the skincare when she did produce the video, 

STEVIE: Which is great. 

KAYLA: Yeah, definitely from her

STEVIE: Obviously would appreciate that from your end as well, hey, 

KAYLA: Absolutely she had a lot of integrity that the way that she sort of did her processes. And I think that that probably is how she’s built such a big honest following, she tries the products with major sponsors, shoot, they always send you through the video for approval first. And you can work together on the captions, making sure it gets across your key messages, and also

So you just go through an approval process, and then pick a date-time all that for when you want them to post. And I think this is probably the most important part, a lot of people think, Brittney, poster video and our sales just go wild. And that’s all done, which did sort of happened that way. But there was a lot of strategy behind the processes and the way we did things. 

So Brittney posted on a Wednesday night at 8 pm, which is when our sales always peak generally with a comment you’ll pick between Tuesday and Thursday. And then your retail shops in shopping centers peak more on weekends. So we wanted to at the peak of e-commerce sales. 

STEVIE:  Yeah. 

KAYLA: And then when you that as soon as she posted lots and lots of people would be coming across to our page. So over on the tribe skincare page, we posted another video that was different from the one she posted. And this was a video about our products or one of our major products. So they sell the product. So then as soon as they came over to our page, they got more video content to see more convincing content. 

That’s really clever. And then from there, they saw a bit about content, I had a photo of myself and my sister as the staff of tribe skincare so that they can kind of connect with a person as well. People really like to connect with the people behind the brands rather than just your products. And from there, they got filtered through to the website, and we had our website set up to absolute optimization of conversions. 

So that was the strategy of the Wednesday night. Then on a Thursday night, we re-posted Brittney’s video. And that was basically to remind her followers who saw it the night before might have forgotten to go through with the purchase. So we re-posted the content on ours they saw it again, a lot more people went through to the website again and completed their check out. 

STEVIE: Yes, 

KAYLA: and then we had our Facebook and Instagram retargeting ads set up. So we retarget anyone who visits the website will start to see our showing up in their Facebook feed. And then also anyone who visits our Instagram page starts to see our ads show up in their Instagram stories or Facebook feed. So we’re retargeting 

STEVIE: Amazing 

KAYLA: That way as well. 

STEVIE: Yeah. 

KAYLA: And that’s what sort of over the last five days we’ve just been having more and more sales coming in from the retargeting. 

STEVIE: Yeah, I can imagine you would, because that’s the thing. So many people kind of land on the sign. And for whatever reason,   get distracted by the kids, so they’re just not quite ready to purchase. They don’t actually go through and purchase. And I think it’s so clever to have those retargeting ads set up and ready to go,  in advance rather than scrambling afterward, 

KAYLA: Yes, so essential for an e-commerce business to have all your retargeting ads set up.

STEVIE: Yeah, awesome. And so in terms of, I guess, the results in terms of new followers and sales and things like that, how many people did Brittney have on her Instagram account? And then what sort of impact did it have directly in terms of your number of followers, and then also in terms of sales over each day. 

KAYLA: So her video has now had about 108,000 views. And that went to about 10,000 of those viewers who came over to our page tried skincare. And then about 3000, also went to our website from there. So we’ve got 1000, web visitors from that. And then a lot of them were doing Checkout, and then a lot more have done check out since then. 

But yeah, that’s amazing thing with all Instagram stats, you can really see where people are getting filtered through your process and any blockages that they may have. So it’s really important to look at the numbers. 

STEVIE: Yeah. And you just I mean, you would really sort of be able to tangibly measure as well, in terms of the investment for Brittney, in terms of that particular influence on, you would be able to really kind of know, the ROI and the fact that I’m guessing you would have made that investment bank sort of several times over. 

KAYLA: Yeah, we’ve made it back five times over now. I’m recording five times that fee in sales since 5 days ago.

STEVIE: Yeah. 

KAYLA: Which is absolutely not, 

STEVIE: and continuing. And so it’s something that you’ll do again, I’m guessing 

KAYLA: Yeah, definitely just keep scaling it and especially now that the influences willing to work with us, we will keep working with major influences scaling it from there, and we know that our sales funnel is working and that our websites at optimum conversion now so we can just keep filtering people through. 

STEVIE: Yeah. And that’s so important as well. So social media is an influencer campaign a step one it is so important that it’s not only influenced so once they’ve kind of put the post up and people have come over to your social media, and then to your website. It’s not to them, then to get the person to buy, you know what I mean?

It needs to have everything set up on your side to really maximize the relationship. And I think that’s one piece that a lot of people miss. 

KAYLA: Definitely, it’s really, it’s just your website traffic that you’re gaining from it. So, Brittney, she can’t have a check out on her Instagram page, someone, can you see the video and check out from there, you’ve got to filter them through your sales funnel. And really just think of the influencer campaign as the first touchpoint. 

STEVIE: So one question, I know that everyone will be asking. And obviously it’s not up to you to disclose Brittney’s rights in particular. But in terms of the general kind of, I guess, writes 50 friends stages of influences, what has been your experience as a sort of a general rule of thumb for micro influences. 

And then for sort of macro influences in terms of when you’re getting to the point when it’s not just for a product? And it’s kind of a paid thing? And then kind of from there? 

KAYLA: Absolutely. So it depends a lot on what your brief is, they will kind of customize their right to that. And they all have such varying rates, that’s something I’ve really noticed is you can be talking to someone with 100,000 followers, and they’ll say I’ll do it for $200. And someone else is the same follow one $700 for the post. 

STEVIE: So true. It’s the Wild West influences, isn’t it with rates? Yeah,

KAYLA: Yeah, there’s no kind of standard, right? I kind of base it on for every hundred thousand, you might look at, say three or $400 and go from there. But it is definitely going to vary depending on what content you want. 

A lot of people base it on 10 cents per like that they get on photos is another way to do it. And then you’re going to look at your 25% increase for video content. 

STEVIE: And it’s really important as well to look at engagement, isn’t it just followers? 

KAYLA: Definitely, yeah. So it’s going to be based a lot on their engagement, their demographic. Just because someone does charge $500 for a post doesn’t mean that $500 is going to be worthwhile for you. 

If they do have a large male following, or they’ve got really low engagement, you do have to be very careful with filtering through fake instances as well. 

STEVIE: And so you can even fake engagement now. So there’s obviously with Instagram posts and things like that, there are a lot of influences that literally they are engagement pods with other influences. And so they’re getting that engagement rate up, which is basically engagement is the number of likes and comments on a particular post. 

So they’re getting that up kind of in a really authentic way. So number one, look at followers and look at engagement, but then really be careful and make sure that it’s genuine followers and genuine engagement. So

KAYLA: Definitely, the way I kind of, it’s not 100% foolproof, but I always look at the video views, because video views are very hard to fake and also quite costly to fake it would cost them let’s go-to kind of Yeah, by a lot of video views. 

So that’s a really good way of doing it. If influencers aren’t doing videos, I always kind of flag that as well, because I know a lot of people are hesitant to post videos for that reason. There’s a video abuse kind of, I guess, give a bit more. Exactly. So video games, it’s a good way to do it. Also asking for their stats and demographics is a really simple way to do it. You can see what countries are following them. Not what countries, what country that their followers are from 

STEVIE: Getting that with a screenshot from their analytics. 

KAYLA: What we asked for, and it tells us the age demographic, the country demographic and female-male following 

STEVIE: Yeah, awesome. One thing I wanted to check with you as well as the way that you actually ran the influencer campaign with Brittney is really clever. So you run it as a competition. 

So tell me a bit about that, as opposed to, I guess just generally right it as Brittney, have tagged you in the post, or whatever, the benefit of running it as a competition,

KAYLA: The benefit of running it as a competition was to give her followers an incentive to come across and follow us. So that facade is it gets them to our page. And we can start retargeting them with ads, and also gets them following us. So they start seeing our content. So we found since she posted her video, our following has actually doubled, which completely blows my mind. Because I had spent six months 

STEVIE:  Yeah, 

KAYLA: Six months of work getting our following to two and a half thousand. And then just like that in about five days, it’s doubled.

STEVIE: So that was so exciting. 

KAYLA: Why pack I think, but yeah, it’s really just about incentive. Getting yourself new followers. And that was something I’ve been doing an online marketing course. I’m not sure how to pronounce her name, but it’s spelled IYIA. 

STEVIE: I think it’s Iyia 

KAYLA:  LIU. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I’m not sure how to pronounce it. But she’s kind of the queen of Instagram competitions. And that was kind of an Instagram hack that she had said about in her online course. And I had never tried it before. And now I won’t do a sponsored video without doing it that way now, because it was just so effective.

STEVIE: No that’s 100%. So in terms of the influencer campaigns that I’ve run 100%, that is always the most effective way to do it. And it’s a great way of measuring the direct success of the campaign as well. 

KAYLA: Absolutely. 

STEVIE: So that’s a really yeah, that’s a really clever one. 

KAYLA: Definitely. 

STEVIE: That is awesome. Kayla, thank you so much. I know that everyone is going to be super interested in our chat. And you obviously got a lot of people asking you different questions in the Facebook group when you were chatting about it as well. Is there anything else that you think would be useful information that I guess you wish you hadn’t had when you were starting out? specifically around influences? 

Because I just feel for a lot of people, it’s one of those things that they’re so keen to do, and they want to start, but because it’s very hard and fast rules, they don’t know where to start, and it kind of that stall them and they don’t end up doing anything. So yeah. Any other insights? I guess that we haven’t chatted about that that you think might be useful for people that are looking to get into influencer marketing? 

KAYLA: Yeah, definitely. I think I was saying before, just the main thing is getting your sales to funnel perfect before you start sponsoring ads on people’s pages because there’s no point paying someone a big pay to promote your product if you’re not going to be able to capture the sales at the other end. So yeah, sure all of that is running really smoothly and converting at a high rate. 

STEVIE: So what do you do around that? What are your top kind of, I guess, a couple of tips around making sure that that’s really optimized? 

KAYLA: Yep. So it’s mainly just about your website, I find I’ve kind of tweaked the website and tested different things to see what the conversions are. And it seems to be the best way to keep your website very simple and straight to the point. So it’s almost less content on your website converts better than if you’re kind of flooding it with all these pages and all this different information about your products, 

STEVIE: You just want to give people one thing to do, which is to buy 

KAYLA: To buy. 

STEVIE: Yeah, 

KAYLA: so we from at Instagram, it takes them straight through to our online catalog or our product page, rather than going to the homepage. And then they’ve got to filter themselves through to the next page, which is the product page. So we just take them straight there instead, I’m not seeing with influences is if you’re working with the same influences over and over again, which can be really good for kind of retargeting their followers, you can get reduced rates by doing it that way. 

STEVIE: Great Tip. 

KAYLA: Yeah. So now that we’re queens, and now that we’ve built a relationship with them, and they trust us, and no, we’re not going to spam a box or anything, we just have them on Instagram dm. And if I’m thinking, Okay, I really need someone to do some video content for our new product, I can just message them in direct message and say, 

Hey, this is what we’re going to be needing this is brief and they’ll just write back yet cool. I’ll do that for however much or whether they’re doing free products and organize it that way. Just through Instagram DM, it’s a lot more casual now. And they do reduce the rates to lower than what their rate card usually is. Because we’re working with the same people over and over. 

STEVIE: Yeah, that’s great.

KAYLA: And they continue to raise we kind of know what returns we get from those particular people as well. So it’s not gambling every single time that you doing an influencer campaign. 

STEVIE: Yeah. And it can be great as well with some of those kinds of small influences to almost all kinds of not just run one campaign at once. I’m not sure if you found this before. 0But if you kind of go with  three or four influences and run the campaign at the same time, it can actually be really effective in terms of I guess, just really kind of saturating the market and getting your sort of name and your brand out there as opposed to working with one and then another one and kind of  not getting that kind of bang 

KAYLA: Yes, that is so true. Especially if the same person might be following a few different people and they’re seeing your brand on all these different touchpoints, it is going to be a lot more effective than having one thing on the goal at once. 

STEVIE: So what’s next for tribe?

KAYLA:   I guess so we’ve just introduced the new trial kits which have been going really well. Keeping on growing the customer base I guess we’re really happy with the product catalog as it is 

STEVIE: Yeah, 

KAYLA:e kind of feel we’ve covered everything now and now it’s just getting the word out there that we’ve got skincare for sensitive skin but for the people that are looking for it 

STEVIE: Yeah, I think you’ll be having so much success at the moment your problem is going to be keeping up with the product it’s not such a bad thing to have.

KAYLA: Yeah, we’re having a bit of a supply and demand issue but 

STEVIE: so where can people find you if they came to I guess check out your Instagram and go and give you a follow and yes see what you’re doing in this space and obviously find out a bit more about you and made a purchase.

KAYLA: Yeah, definitely. So um, we can be followed on Instagram which is at tried skincare, or our website is www.skincare.com.au and then there’s also a list of stockists on the website. So we sell through other sites and stores as well. So some people don’t like to buy in-store go to the stockist web until stockist listing and find a store where they can test the products and purchase or they’re available directly through the website as well. 

STEVIE: Thank you so much, Kayla. 

KAYLA: No worries. Thanks for having me. 

STEVIE: No worries.

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