Happy Sunday! Black Friday is almost here. Most sales have started, but more will be kicking off this week. Hoping it's all smooth sailing and above your expectations. I spent what free time I had this weekend playing around with Agentio, which is a really platform that makes Youtube creator partnerships really easy. I want to share some about the platform and what we are planning on doing.
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As part of our 2025 planning, we have a few big "big rock" goals. We probably have around 8 big rock goals, with supporting goals underneath them. One of our largest goals is to do a better job reaching a younger, millennial audience. In my opinion, one of the biggest ways to do this is going to be with creator, or influencer marketing, for so many reasons. Millennials respond best to creators versus brands or publications, and they also respond well to authentic content versus perfectly produced content. I think we do a good job of branded content and we've likely gotten most out of press as we will, so it's time to "pivot" to doing a better job with creators.
We will do more organic seeding, plus some paid influencer efforts on Instagram and Tiktok. But the thing I am most excited about is Youtube creator partnerships, which we will do all through Agentio, who has generously sponsored this issue. I've wanted to do this style of marketing for a while now, but it always felt daunting. I know brands who do a bunch of it and they have multiple people on their teams just to facilitate the outreach, negotiations, contracts, briefs, and more. Agentio makes this super easy. I want to take you through the platform and what it looks like to set up a campaign.
First, you set up your campaign just as you would in Meta or a similar ad platform. You pick your objectives, budget, timeline, and the CPM you want to pay. You also pick your audience demographics, attribution settings, and more. This takes about 5 minutes to do, and it honestly the bulk of the setup. Next you create a brief in the platform, which is also pretty easy. You can choose to do the same brief for all creators, or one for the campaign. You do these, and then you get matched with creators.
To me this is where the fun starts. I spent a few hours this weekend going through creators, and making a short list of our potential options. You'll get a list of creators to consider, which will be ranked by how good of a match they are to your campaign criteria. You can see the reasons why this creator was recommended, get audience and watch time stats for the creator, and any performance callouts. For example, you may see "This creator ranks in the top 10% for video retention" or something similar, which is really cool. You can also see their content pillars on their channel, and where their audience lives. Now this is my favorite part, you can see a few of their recent Youtube videos with links to skip to the ad reads so you can see recent ads they have had on their channel. I must say, I am very impressed with most of these creators. They do an amazing job building these ads into their videos in an authentic way that really makes you feel like they are just organically talking about the products.
Over the weekend I built a short list of creators, and I'm going to share it with my team and also do a lot more research on these creators. I will watch more of their videos, check them our on other social channels, google them, and more. For us, we plan to test a few non-beauty verticals like fashion, parenting, health, and business with maybe just a tad of beauty phased in. Since this is our first test, we want to test a few and see which seems to resonate best.
Now for some campaign best practices that the Agentio team has given me. They recommend a 25/75% mix of macro to micros. 25% of budget should be spent on creators with very large channels, while most of the budget should be on more mid-tier creators. Many of these are surprisingly affordable, with many videos in low thousands. They say frequency is really important, so don't spread budget too thin.
Now for measurement and tracking. In their platform, you can set UTMs either for the campaign or specific ones for the creator. They make this super easy. Most brands will also use a discount code for each creator. You kind of have to triangulate a combo of the two; my guess is that about half of the revenue comes directly from people clicking on the link and the rest comes from people searching later and potentially using that creator's discount code. We don't normally discount so not sure what we will do, but we may use a code for a GWP. You can also add an answer of "influencer" or Youtube channel to your post-purchase survey and add a conditional answer where you ask them which creator.
Agentio recently got integrated with Northbeam and our MMM Prescient, which I am pumped about. We'll be using a mix of all of these to help us measure, but I'm really pumped about the MMM integration. Once your campaigns go live, you also get a ton of data in Agentio straight from Youtube.
This is one of those things where you have to be patient and give it enough of time; so we're going to do a 3-month pilot. You can also pay to license the content across paid social, which we will definitely do. I think the combo of these ad reads for distribution and new reach plus whitelisting ads with these creators will really help us reach a new audience.
I'll keep you posted on how this channel works for us. It's something I am really excited about, and I think it will really help us unlock some new audiences.
Agentio recently announced their Series A raise, led by the legendary Benchmark Partners. It looks like they will beef up their connections with creators, and add integrations to other social channels which will be awesome. I'm excited to follow this company closely and see how they make creator partnerships a really scalable and trackable channel; especially for lean teams like ours.
If you'd like to check out Agentio for yourself, either go to their website to book a demo or email their co-founder and CEO Arthur Leopold directly at arthur@agentio.com and tell him you came directly from my newsletter to get the VIP treatment. You won't be disappointed.
Happy Black Friday week.
-Cody