Lessons - Why You Need To Build Community & Find Fans | Swish Goswami, CEO of TruFan

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode, we'll feature concise and insightful, actionable conversations and tactics, providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. Yeah, so paid advertising has four key problems. And by paid advertising, I mean Instagram, Google, Facebook ads. The first problem is ad fraud. So click farms, domain laundering, are leading to a lot of money being wasted. About $50 billion to $150 billion in the next five years is going to be lost due to ad fraud. Second big issue is that ad blockers are on the rise. So my co-founder and I both have our ad blockers on on YouTube. About 40% of North American YouTube users have ad blockers on, and that number is only rising globally. The third is that brands have no clue where their ads are being put on. I know Verizon and JP Morgan last year had issues where their ads were being put on top of racist YouTube content. And that's a big issue, right? Imagine waking up as a PR manager and being like, well, I had no control in this, but now we have a PR crisis to deal with. And the fourth and final reason on why paid advertising, in my opinion, at the bubble that will burst is, we think there's a difference between selection effect and advertising effect. So I'll give you an example to describe this. Imagine that we were all in a pizza store. And you and I were employees at the pizza store, I, we were told, all right, the person who sells the most is going to win this month's challenge. You decided to go outside the store and start trying to give coupons that way. Instead of doing that, I beat you by staying inside the store and giving coupons to people that were in line already. That's literally what paid advertising is, is there's no way to truly understand whether advertisements are going towards people that didn't already have buying in 10. So the ads that you're showing is Puma to shoe lovers. How do you know that you're actually hitting an audience that wasn't already going to buy from you? That's something that brand marketers right now cannot, they cannot figure out and it's a big issue behind why a lot of times they're paid advertising spend goes to waste. So we think like this is all bad and obviously a lot of that money is going to shift towards influencer marketing. The influencer marketing industry will become an $11 billion industry by the end of the year. It's only growing every single year. But influencer marketing in the way it was done previously is also problematic. My co-founder and I noted that a lot of times brands have been spending frivolously on influencers that have fake engagement, they have fake followers. Just because they have the million followers, people will pay them. The big metric that a lot of brands are trying to look for is impressions, views, they're not trying to look for conversion. So we think there's a much better model of influencer marketing that you can do and that's through our platform by empowering your own audience, made up of super fans, brand advocates and micro influencers that are likely yield better results in the long term. Now do you still see because that is always that that's always the issue with influencer marketing, right? Measurable to the same extent as paid, but now you're saying, well, what's the point of measuring paid if it's already going towards people that are already buying? Yeah. And how do you solve for like even even, so I totally understand where you're going with true fan with like you're niching down into these micro influencers with like hyper-targeted like great engagement, but how do you remove I guess the aversion to throwing money in and still not seeing like, how do you know that they're authentic, they're genuine? Even ever smaller. Great question. So there's a couple of answers to that, A is we actually have added in an element of measurement to be able to allow you to measure before and after a campaign how it did. So first of all, when you come on to our platform, you're actually able to see every single profile and you're able to see how many fake followers they have. We actually have like an accuracy rate now, about 98%, we did that through the previous founders of social rank, they bottled bunch of fake accounts, they built out an ML program to be able to analyze which were fake followers and which were not. So for us, the first thing right off the bat is you know you can test these people before you even reach out to them to see how many fake followers they have and to also really understand all right, does this person have an audience that I'm not already targeting? You can do that. You can take their audience, you can take your audience and you can do an overlap to see how many people overlap between this influencer's audience and my brand's profile. And if it's a lot, maybe you don't want to work with them because you're not going to reach a new audience by working with them. So you can validate an influencer even before a campaign starts. After the campaign is done, you can measure the results of that campaign by going back and looking at that same overlap because hopefully if that campaign was done well, they are going to be some people that trickle over from that influencer's following into yours. And that's something that's important to measure, especially over time. So a key example that we always talk about is Sprite and LeBron James. They signed a partnership a few years ago. It's worth noting that we can actually go back to 2018 and see what the brand overlap is between LeBron James's followers and Sprite. It was to think about 200,000 people. Now, let's take a look at it in 2020. Has that number grown? Has Sprite truly got a benefit from having LeBron James as a grand ambassador? That's something that we can quantify on our platform. Now, so this is all great and I believe in what you're saying. But what about the paid ad platforms that the influencers are on that are constantly trying to take in theory? You hear about the algorithm changing. Instagram is no longer showing the same organic reach to an influencer's following as it once did. And the conspiracy theories that they want to take some of that ad revenue and turn it into paid ads on Facebook and Instagram and whatnot. So all these companies have billions of dollars. But influencers are just these small little sole proprietors, mostly, how do they combat like the changing algorithm to stay relevant? What do you see the future of that dichotomy looking like? Yeah, I think look, there are going to be a bunch of influencers that truly care about the algorithm. I think the ones that are going to win in the long term are going to have a key focus beyond just the algorithm on their community. Like I think it goes a long way when you can go out of your way and reward your community and make them feel loved and make them truly, truly believe in the message that you're sharing. The number one example is someone that I think has done this really well in my David Dober. You take a look at it. It doesn't matter what way the Instagram algorithm goes. His videos are still going to go viral. His photos are still going to have millions of likes and millions of people commenting. And the reason why is people have fallen in love with who he is, they find him authentic. And more importantly, he actually cares about his community. He reaches out to them. He rewards them with merchandise. He spends time doing live stream and answering their questions. These are the people that I think are generally going to win. And that's what I've actually to an aspect done on LinkedIn as well. Obviously, it's not such a big sale as a David Dober. But the reason why LinkedIn is still a big platform for me, despite three years of algorithm changes, is because I've invested a lot of time in talking to my community, whether it's talking to them on the phone on a five minute call, we're talking to them in the comments where I still, to date, try to reply to every single comment that I get. So do you think that that mentality, like the trying to play the algorithm, is going to be essentially the death of fake influencers? And if influencers, if there could be like one lesson for people that are trying to sort of take their brand, their influencer brand into the next, I guess, you know, to the future of marketing, it would be to truly build out and be authentic with their community. That's really the only way to win. I really think it is. I really think it is, because I think three things, you know, building a brand, the three things that comes down to is content, community, and collaboration. Collaboration is something some people can do, some people can't. It depends where you are. If you're in LA, you're probably going to be able to find other influencers to collaborate with, do videos with, take photos with, write articles with whatever. If you're in, I don't know, Missouri or whatever, like, or St. Louis, it might be a little more difficult compared to LA to be able to find those people. What happens is something that can differentiate you as well. But the way that we're, you know, we're inundated again with so many pieces of content every single day, you know, as a consumer, we're bombarded with sponsored posts on top of sponsored posts. It's really hard these days to stick out unless you're Mr. Beast and you're able to put $500,000 into a video doing a crazy stunt that nobody's ever done before. That's a really hard way to differentiate yourself as well. So I do think that the golden egg then is community. I think the way to be able to differentiate yourself is to have a very strong focus to where my top fans, how do I mobilize them, activate them, and make them feel valued for their loyalty. That's what I think, like, building a brand community building and even true fan really comes down to.