5 Tips on Influencers, Content, and ROAS

Today’s guest knows influencer and community-building as well as any other Marketer on the timeline.

CEO of Influicity, a media company working with some of the largest brands in the world (50k+ employees) with the ultimate goal of helping them own their influence, meet Jon Davids.

PS, Jon is one of the best follows on LinkedIn, his storytelling is NEXT LEVEL.

Let’s see what influencer, social media, and community-building tips Jon had to say on the pod in his own liiiiiightly edited words.

1. Influencers That Will Get You Highest ROI:

“Look at somebody like Mr. Beast or Kim Kardashian, they can launch a brand and have it become number one in the category almost overnight. (They make it look easy.)

Some people will look at that and say it’s easy for them because they’re celebrities when in reality there are so many examples of influencer brands that come and go and we never hear a peep from them (anybody know what happened to Cacti by Travis Scott?).

The ones that actually do make it, follow this pattern of connecting with their audience and building on a consistent basis long before they figure out how to monetize or sell anything. 

And they perfect these three things: 

1️⃣. They have a unifying belief.

2️⃣. They create faith in that unifying belief.

3️⃣. They give people an action to take.

A super simple example would be someone that talks about health or fitness and they might create content around taking an ice bath every morning or going for a 10 mile run. Then they’ll start to put content out that creates faith around that personal experience.

These movements tend to do better than anything else and that really is the core of a successful influencer. 

2. Why Haters Are Important:

If you have no haters, it’s very hard to have lovers (RETWEET).

There’s a cookie brand, (I won’t say the name of the brand), that sells cookies and a lot of people love the cookies, but a lot of people also hate the cookies. 

Yet the brand absolutely crushes.

It’s not because the cookies are the best on the market, it’s the fact that they have both lovers and haters and people debate the brand online.

That is one of the factors that makes this brand so powerful.

And we see this all the time in sports and politics where something bubbles to mainstream. There’s usually an element of people who love it and hate it and if you don’t have that, then your product’s really not that interesting. 

3. Creating The First Initial Belief In Your Brand:

The very first step you can take is to start long before you have a business. 

Figure out what it is that you want to do, what you want to build in the future.

Is it a fitness center, is it a dog care facility?

Whatever it is, identify the core tenet or belief that you have that you’re going to bring to that business. 

(This is a hill you would die on in regards to the business you choose.)

Then choose your form of content to get that message across initially. Do you want to blog? Do you want to do a podcast? Do you want to make short clips or long videos? What’s something that you can do consistently for a long period of time? (This last one is most important.) 

The last thing is the main character. Every really powerful brand or movement has a main character. 

If you’re the founder of a company, 99% of the time, it’s going to be you, you’re going to be the main character because you’re the one that’s the most passionate about the topic.

But the way to think about the main character is it is the person who is going to be delivering this message consistently for the brand. There’s three ways to do this:

1️⃣. Document your own journey.

2️⃣. Report on other people’s journeys.

3️⃣. Start to teach something. 

Put those pieces together and start to make the content. The earlier in your journey, the better.

(Marketing Bestie you give off some main character energy LOL.)

4. Building Your Community:

(I wouldn’t recommend podcasts as a starting point unless you’re looking to create a content engine.)

The very first thing I would do if you want to build a community is to figure out who is the main character of your brand?

If you’re a big brand, look at a celebrity, influencer, or some other spokesperson like Progressive and Dos Equis have done in the past. 

If you’re a small brand, the main character will probably be a founder or a co-founder. 

The second thing to look at is what’s the best way to get their content out there.

There has to be a match of how the main character communicates and how the audience wants to receive that information (find the SYNERGY).

So if your main character doesn’t like creating video content but your target demo only wants to see video content, you’re in a little bit of a pickle there and might need to rethink your main character.

And then I would spend time thinking about your unifying belief.

What is it about what you do or what you think that makes you unique? 

This is NOT your mission statement which typically states, why this business exists. 

The unifying belief is a total opposite because nobody actually cares about your why, they care about themselves. So what is it about what you’re doing that’s in it for your customers. Are they going to be able to lose weight? Are they going to be a better parent? 

What is it about what you’re doing that’s in it for them. 

So come up with those three things, the main character, what platform they’re going to be on, and your unifying belief. 

That’s where it all starts.

5. Does ROAS Matter?

You don’t even realize how powerful having an organic way for people to find you is until you have it. (This is why I am SO bullish on personal brands on LinkedIn.)

The amount of growth you can have, the opportunities you’ll have, the way it changes everything about your business outlook, you can’t buy your way to that.

If you can figure out a way to get people interested in you without having to pay to get in front of them, if you can have people fall in love with you organically, that is a thousand times better.

I always laugh when people tell me their ROAS. Their ROAS is 6 to 1 or 30 to 1, every dollar they spend they make 30 bucks.

I always say to them I have a ROAS of 1,000 to 1. (BOOM.)

I spend nothing and I make seven, eight figures. That’s the power of organic social.”