How To Leverage Live Shopping Influencers To Grow Sales w/ Geoffroy Robin

Reading Time: 25 minutes

Coresight Research has estimated that the US livestreaming market would hit $20 billion last year. Then, by 2026, it will more than triple to an estimated $68 billion in sales.

And interestingly, 50% of Millennials trust product recommendations from influencers. 

So it would seem that combining an influencer with a live shopping event that showcases your brand and product offerings would be a lucrative match. But it’s not as easy as it sounds.

How do you get started with live shopping influencers? What kinds of events should you arrange? How do you measure ROI?

That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.

Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building… oh, and you get to learn too! Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy – with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.

Now listen, we all know how powerful video is for reaching and engaging new audiences, and we all know how effective influencer marketing can be for transferring trust. So it makes sense that integrating influencers into your video – specifically, live shoppable video – should be a successful and lucrative tactic for businesses.

But wait. How are we supposed to produce live shopping videos? And how do we find influencers who can handle this new medium? Is this really a good idea?

That’s exactly what our guest today, Geoffroy Robin, is going to talk to us about.

Geoff is the Partner and Chief Operating Officer at Livescale, one of the top live shopping platforms in the world. Livescale makes Live Streaming Shopping possible for retailers and influencers, and it’s used by big brands like L’Oréal and Lancôme.

He’s spent over twenty years in the digital ecosystem as an entrepreneur, innovation enthusiast, and a passionate voice for emerging technologies, and he’s a wealth of knowledge when it comes to live shopping and the utilization of influencers.

So you know I’ve got a ton of questions for him, so let’s get started.

Partnership Unpacked host Mike Allton talked to Geoff about:

♉️ How Live Shopping has evolved for influencers and brands alike.

♉️ How brands can track ROI from influencers and live shopping events.

♉️ Where brands are getting influencer marketing right… and wrong!

Learn more about Geoffroy Robin

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Notes & Transcript:

(Lightly edited)

How To Leverage Live Shopping Influencers To Grow Sales with Geoffroy Robin

[00:00:00] Mike Allton: Core site research has estimated that the US live streaming market hit 20 billion last year, and then by 2026 it’s gonna more than triple to an estimated 68 billion in sales. And interestingly, 50% of millennials trust product recommendations from influencers. So it would seem that combining an influencer with a live shopping event that showcases your brand and product offerings would be a lucrative match.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds. How do you get started with live shopping influencers? What kind of events should you arrange? How do you measure roi? That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.

This is Partnership unpacked your Go-to Guide to Growing Your Business through partnerships quickly. I’m your host, Mike Alton, and each episode unpacks the winning strategies and latest trends from influencer marketing to brand partnerships and ideas that you can apply your own this as to grow exponentially.

And now the rest of today’s episode. Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked. Selfishly used this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates influence marketing and relationship building. Oh, and you get to learn, too. Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.

Now listen, we all know how powerful video is for reaching and engaging new audiences, and we all know how effective influencer marketing can be for transferring. So it makes sense the integrating influencers into your video specifically, live shoppable video should be a successful and lucrative tactic for businesses.

But wait, how are we supposed to produce live shopping videos? How do we find influencers who can handle this new medium? Is this. Really a good idea. That’s exactly what our guest today, Geoffrey Robin is gonna talk to us about. Geoff is the partner and chief operating officer at Live Scale, one of the top live shopping platforms in the world.

Live Scale makes live streaming shopping possible for retailers and influencers, and it’s used by big brands like L’Oreal Lang, Comme. He spent over 20 years in the digital ecosystem as an entrepreneur, innovation enthusiast, and a passionate voice for emerging technologies. And he’s a wealth of knowledge when it comes to live shopping and the utilization of influencers.

So, you know, I’ve got a ton of questions in mind. Jeff, welcome to the show.

[00:02:39] Geoffroy Robin: Hey Mike, thanks for the invitation. Glad to be here today. [00:02:43] Mike Allton: Great to talk to you. Great to talk to you in my studio. I was a guest in your studio not too long ago. Thanks again for that. That was a lot of fun. Let’s start by giving listeners some background on just what life scale is and the role that you play there. [00:02:57] Geoffroy Robin: Yeah, sure. So live scale, as you said, is a live shopping partner. So basically what we do and how we work with our clients is that we provide the platform, the technology, and also all live shopping services around this to make our clients successful when it comes to them embracing this new industry and this new trend of, uh, that is live shopping.

So we go from. Sitting down with our clients, defining what the strategy live shopping strategy should be about to naturally their marketing objective, their brand dna, to bringing them some talents, influencers, producers as well, if they need that for some support as part of the live shopping execution.

And we have the platform that allow them, obviously, to create this live shopping events directly on the website and easy to share them through social media as well.

[00:03:42] Mike Allton: So live scale actually helps connect influencers with brands. Did I hear that correctly? [00:03:48] Geoffroy Robin: Yeah, correct. So actually we have clients that come to us saying, okay, I know what I want to do when it comes to live shopping, uh, between you and I, that’s a small percentage of clients today.

Uh, most of them really need some guidance because, and you said it as part of the introduction, live shopping is still new, so, When you look at China Asia, when you see this influencers doing like 14 hours of live streaming per day. So what I call nonstop live shopping, right? They sell products, products, products all the time.

This is not what’s happening in the rest of the world. So let’s keep in mind that’s China Asia. Is a very different landscape when it comes to live shopping than the rest of the world. What we’ve seen in the rest of the oil when it comes to live shopping is really live shopping being handled by brands, retailers, media as well.

Media groups or publishers, really are using live shopping as an awareness tool, engagement tool, and sales tools as well. And as part of this, so we have clients that, again, come to us saying, I know exactly what I wanna do in terms of content. So what I need is your tech to execute this live shopping strategy.

But again, that’s a small percentage. Most of the clients today need some help and guidance when it comes to the content creation. So it goes from, what should I do in terms of live shopping events? What should be the content? Who should be the host, who should be the face? And to your point, Mike, it’s indeed where we can help them.

We have a pool of talents, so we like calling them talents because to go live. It requires specific skills. So for sure, when you look at influencers, you see many influencers being very successful on social media, TikTok, Instagram, and all the networks that exist. But doing live is very different from just posting a static picture.

It’s already a lot of work. Don’t take me wrong here. Creating this community and, and this, uh, disengagement buildings already a massive work to be done here. But going live again, it’s something different. We all have this Janet Jackson moments in mind. So it’s the fear of going live, that all persons that are touching the live component have in mind.

So yes, we’re able to help our clients by bringing them some talents that come from social media, but also TV shopping channels like Q V C, the shopping choice in Canada as well. So, These persons have massive experience when it comes to life. They’re able to obviously guide and, and be the voice of our client basically through this live shopping events.

So yeah, bringing talents and also recommended what and who should be the, the horse and the influencers that our clients can leverage on when it comes to their live shopping strategy.

[00:06:10] Mike Allton: Now, I always had trepidation about going live, but I never ever pictured it as a Janet Jackson moment. So we’ll just put that aside for the moment, but I, I appreciate you laying out that additional detail on, on how you’re helping brands actually source.

Influencers. That’s a big pain point for B2B brands in particular, cuz you’re right, going live is different from other forms of content creation, other forms of communication with an influencer’s audience. Yeah. And you mentioned how different things are in China. In Asia. We’ve seen a little bit of that coming to the US with like Amazon shopping days and, and US influencers starting to go live almost all day long on.

But how else would you say the live shopping industry has changed and evolved just over the past year or two?

[00:06:58] Geoffroy Robin: Yeah, so I, I think two components here that makes live shopping evolve. Obviously it’s from one, the lens of the brand itself. So how, uh, willing is the brand to go live and what will be the frequency of the live.

So what will, when we look again through the lens of the brand, we see brands going live. Once a week, once every two weeks. Some of them will go live a bit more than that, but for sure we’re far away from the, again, the 14 hours per day. So that’s from a brand perspective. And if we look through the lens of the audience, we can still see that in the rest of the world.

When you go on social, basically you are there to be entertained, so you wanna consume mostly short form video content. So you wanna be abused, you wanna spend good time here. So all this social commerce trend, basically, it’s still early in the west, so we don’t. And as we, I include myself in it. When I’m on social, I’m okay to discover new things.

I’m okay to have fun, but I’m not really okay to buy. And again, if we take this parallel with, with Asia and China, the first thing a user will do when they register to Witch to Tobo and all these different places, they will enter the credit card information. So it’s transactional from the get-go. You register here, first thing you do is payment information.

As you’ve done it on TikTok or Instagram, what you do is your email address. And then I switch directly to my interest, what I want to follow, fashion, beauty, music, all the, the interests that I have there. And from there I’ll build a community. I’ll build and I’ll follow inferences that are of interest to me.

But again, the landscape and the mindset is very different and what we’ve seen evolve, uh uh, North America, Europe. So in the rest of the world, again, I always do this in differentiation between Asia and the rest of the world for the past years, is that we’ve seen a use of live shopping overall, uh, to evolve towards more and more understanding that creating a live shopping strategy.

It’s a long-term play. It’s not like a one-off events. You, you can. From time to time around specific days of the year as well. But for your live shopping strategy to be successful, you need to have a recurrency. You need to do it regularly. You need to create also and educate the audience again to the point of the, the lens of the audience.

They need to, to have the habit and they need to be used to seeing you going live and joining you for this kind of moment in order to start purchasing, in order to start engaging with you even more so collecting even more data about this. So yeah, the past year, I would say went. 2020, which is what we call year zero of live shopping because this is really where it’s been really popularized, uh, thanks to the pandemic.

I mean, um, brands, were looking at some options to keep selling. So from 2020 to now, we’re soon again, an evolution towards yes, live shopping. It’s not only about doing instant sales during the event, but again, creating this long and lasting relationship with the client and overall contributing to theri of all my marketing spend.

So, Seeing live shopping as being a strong contributor to the overall marketing funnel, and not only the bottom of the funnel to do just sales.

[00:09:58] Mike Allton: It’s such a fascinating insight, particularly when you were talking about how the entire purpose, basically of these Asian apps mm-hmm. Is different. And their approach is different from the initial client onboarding.

And for those of you listening, you know, who may not be familiar with those. Apps, you may not have accounts there. You might think of it like your Roku, where when you’re setting up a Roku at home, you put in your email and then you add your credit card. Even if you’re not signing up for any Roku services at that particular moment, you give Roku your credit card.

So when you do see, hey, there’s a movie I wanna rent, or a TV show I wanna download, or a subscription service like H B O that I wanna start. On your television, it’s just a click of a button. You don’t have to reenter that credit card. It’s automatically added. So it makes it a seamless, easy process for you, which means it’s much more lucrative for the platform and the app provider, and it’s a go-to place for everything basically.

[00:10:51] Geoffroy Robin: So you can order your taxi, you can buy your food, you can uh, buy clothing, you can, it’s. Again, a go-to place for, if we compare this with, uh, existing initiatives here, it would be some kind of Amazon without today the, the component of inference, or even if Amazon launched Amazon Live as well, and they have this, I mean, It’s not working as efficiently as Amazon would like it to work because it’s really basically missing this brand implication as part of this show.

So it’s really basically Amazon representative selling product through live video. And they have this bunch, this list of products that they’re showing in front of the video camera. But as a viewer, you’ll say, okay. What’s the story behind this product? What’s the story behind the brand? And the person basically hosting this kind of events, they don’t know about it or even they don’t care about it.

That’s not really their job. They’re here to basically show the products and that’s it. So this is really, I would say, the old fashioned way of selling products. Whereas when we see live shopping working efficiently on the long term, it’s when the brand is really owning this initiative, bringing external insurances, bringing, bringing internal experts also about the brands.

All these elements combined makes a success. So, but yeah, to, to your point again, yeah. Different habits and ho audiences between Asia and the rest of the world. We can see a maturity of the, of the audience in, in the US for example, uh, going towards more and more transactional behaviors, but it’ll take time.

We’re not there yet.

[00:12:16] Mike Allton: To your point, when you say old-fashioned, we’re almost talking about like QVC or the home shopping network for those, remember those stations? I don’t even know if they’re still around anymore. People. [00:12:26] Geoffroy Robin: Yeah, they’re, they’re, and they’re working great actually. Yeah, they’re working great.

And it’s very complimentary with the digital live shopping, I would say, what life scale bring, and we have actually clients that are doing QVC and are doing, uh, live scale at the same time because they, they really see a complimentary between the two. QVC has such a. Pool of audience to reach there so that they have to be there and they will reach a specific category of audience.

And with live scale, they will reach another part of the audience that is more digital based and digital focused. And with live scale, they’re able also to collect direct data and direct feedback from the audience, which is not the case on tv, right? Once you’re behind the screen, you purchase. So as a brand, I’ll know what the sales I would have generated through qvc.

But did my audience say about this product during the show? Were they happy, not happy? Did they have specific questions, et cetera? It’s not that easy on TV, obviously, to get this direct feedback from the audience, whereas on digital, obviously you have access to everything, so

[00:13:22] Mike Allton: love it. I think we’re gonna come back to that point in just a second, but I want to ask you, because I know in your role.

You’ve worked with both brands mm-hmm. As partnerships and with individual influencers. And I’d love to know from your perspective, what differences have you noticed between brand partners and influencers as partners? Yeah.

[00:13:41] Geoffroy Robin: So when the brand coming to us and when the A brand wants to launch a live shopping strategy, again, it’s directly supporting their own marketing initiative.

So what we like saying is live shopping in that sense become an additional. A marketing channel as part of what they do. So you have pay media, you have uh, organic, you have social, you have live shopping, and it has to, has its own attribution model as well. So it has to fit within the attribution model because to what I was saying earlier about the fact that live shopping is a strong contributor to sales, it will generate sales during the sessions and it will contribute to sales long term as well.

You really need to identify it as part of the marketing activities. So for, from, from a brand standpoint, again, it. Complement. Basically it’s complete other activities that they’re doing, leveraging on existing initiative that they have as well. You mentioned influencers, so when they’re already using influencer marketing, how do I bring this influencer marketing piece as part of my live shopping strategy?

These live shopping events are also hosted on the website, so it enrich the user experience overall. When a viewer, a user, a client will arrive on the website, they have access. Static products or the product, the usual product pages that are on the website. They also have now a chat bot. They can interact directly with the client support and they also have sort a live shopping where I can join on specific session and have this intimate and authentic moment with the brand as well.

So that’s really how live shopping is being used by brands, really, again, to be an additional channel as part of their existing marketing strategy. From an influencer perspective, so either they already linked to the brand. So coming back to the, the, the brand model I was mentioning, they will work directly with the brand and in that case, the brand will control all this if the influencer is basically on its own and wants to do live shopping on its own.

Basically to, they wanna use live scale to generate sales for brands. The concept will be a bit different. Obviously, they will leverage on an existing audience. So if they have a strong audience on TikTok, on Instagram, so they will create their live shopping event on live scale. They will insert the products of the brand they wanna sell.

So it could be one brand, multiple products, multiple products from different brands as well. So they really have this flexibility here. And the model we see here usually. Really affiliation, so aate marketing, so leveraging on live shopping to create more sales for the brands and the advertiser they’re working with.

But in that case, again, it’s theor that is working on his own without, I would say the, the brand in its ecosystem.

[00:16:04] Mike Allton: Love it. And what I’m hearing is that all the technical challenges that I kind of alluded to at the beginning mm-hmm. Of scale is taking care of all that. You know, you’re embedding the livestream in your website, you’ve got the chat, you’ve got all that stuff that’s happening.

So that me as the producer of the brand, I don’t have to think about that too much. Correct. And I love how you mentioned that it’s creating an experience. For the consumer. That’s something that, uh, Lee Odden in a previous conversation and I, we were talking about from the influencers perspective, creating a wonderful experience for them.

Now here we’re talking about creating an experience with influencers for the consumers because it’s that experiences that impact people, and that makes it a lot easier for them to open their wallet. Now that we’ve talked about the technical bit a little bit, what I want to ask you is when it comes to working with influencers, how do brands actually get started?

How do we reach out to these influencers and actually bring them on board and and get them to represent our brands?

[00:17:04] Geoffroy Robin: Yeah, so I mean d different ways. And, uh, so if we take a brand for example, that already has a strong influencer marketing strategy, so if they wanna bring these influencers as part of their live shopping strategy.

So first of all, obviously as I said earlier, not every influencer is, uh, able and has the skills basically to go live. So that will be, I would say, a first selection to be done among the influencer. So if they already have this relationship, it. Basically taking them to the next level of this relationship and all the influencers that are working with our existing clients when they are brands.

It’s always a great moment to have, as you said, it’s bring even more to the relationship that brands already have with influencers because of this authenticity factor. When you are live, you can’t shoot right? You can’t do multiple videos, probably call multiple videos and redo this, know your life. So to one shot here and at the end it’s beneficial for both the brands and the influencers and for a brand basically that.

The partnership and the relationship and building basically this relationship with influencers. Obviously there’s many influencers on social media and that’s also why AtScale, we’ve done this selection of talents specifically for live shopping. Because if you go out and start looking for influencers, obviously you have lots of great influencer marketing tool to filter and to look at, uh, specific profiles depending on, on your industry, depending on the audience that you, you wanna reach here.

So the first strategy will be to start using one of this platform. To already start doing the first filtering when it comes to the type of profiles here at the audience you’re looking at. Once you have this first selection, if you really wanna do live shopping with this influencers, my recommendation will be obviously to discuss the life scale or another partner in this ecosystem here to validate the skills, the life skills of this person here.

There’s also trainings that exist because if you find the rise influencer and you really want to work this influencer, and this influencer is really willing to learn and go live as well and become the next live seller, you also have options to train this influencers in becoming the live sellers. But again, the starting point is, Not all the influencers are, uh, can be life sellers and even within the life sellers would see different categories.

You might have heard of key opinion leaders, key opinion sellers, et cetera. These are different personalities in terms of life sellers that that we see in the industry as well. So it’s also come down to the concept of the event you wanna do. If you wanna do a live shopping that is purely sales oriented, so you wanna sell, sell, sell, sell, and only sell for sure.

It will be different typology of influencer. Uh, whereas if you wanna bring eyeballs, awareness, a lot of visibility to your events, you’ll be targeting the different typology of influencers as well. So those we call key opinion leaders. That will be more like, Leading the hosting of your event, doing the promotion, bringing radio audience, and generating all this crazy engagement during your lives as well.

[00:19:53] Mike Allton: It’s terrific advice and, and for those of you who wanna even deeper dive into how brands can select influencers, listen to our previous episode with Leo and we were talking mostly about B2B influencers, but a lot of the principles that he was sharing in that episode were the same now, Jeff. Yeah.

Obviously one of the clear benefits of live shopping, and you kind of touched on this already, is that because it’s a digital. Medium. We can track the revenue and the sales and we can see that roi, but how else can brands measure the ROI from these kinds of influencer activities?

[00:20:24] Geoffroy Robin: Well, thi this is, again, live shopping ROI shouldn’t be only measured during the live event itself.

That’s what we tend to see a lot at the very beginning of live shopping is like, How much sales I’m going to generate in one life. And again, it all comes down to what we see in Asia for sure. We needed to have a reference at the beginning, so we rely on what existed at that time in terms of live shopping, and that was in China and Asia.

Now that there’s more activation, obviously in the rest of the world, in the US and Europe and other countries, we see more and more the I Iri being measured more long-term. So an influencer. Roi, you will measure it over time. So for sure, the same as, uh, we were discussing about the typologies and personalities of influencers.

Select an influencer, first of all that will make sense for your brand, obviously, but also build this. Midterm long-term collaboration with this influencer. If we take an example of a live shopping strategy, you will have an we like at live scale talking about a TV series. So your live shopping strategy will be, uh, season one, and within the season one you have multiple episodes.

And these episodes will bring these influencers that you will have signed a partnership with. So this influencer, you know that, for example, if it’s a key opinion leader, so again, the one bringing the eyeballs and the awareness, you know, that you can use this influencer like every two or three episodes.

This way you know that you’re gonna feed the top of your marketing funnel with new eyeballs and a new audience there, and you mix this concept of Evans with other Evans that will be more towards. Converting this client. So if you are like a beauty brand and you have really strong experts within your product team that know the product by hearts and they’re able to share all the benefits of the products, then you will use this host.

So not an influencer in that case, but an internal resource that is able to be your life seller to mix this with, again, influencers there. So, Again, RA to measure effi influencers. Efficient efficiency, especially during live shopping, should not only be measured during a one live. So even if you do one live with one influencer, you’ll look at the following days of your c2 C what and how live shopping contributing to generating your cells.

Uh, 24 8. 48 72 hours after the. So already seeing this, and again, the advice is ready to use this influencers for several episodes in order to build this long-term relationship with the influencer himself, but also obviously with the audience.

[00:22:46] Mike Allton: Folks go back and re-listen to the last three or four minutes cuz Geoff wasn’t just sharing how to measure roi.

He was laying out this masterclass of how to build this omnichannel threaded influencer marketing campaign that’s going to establish thought leadership and drive actual results. Fantastic. Re-listen to that. Now let’s take a moment to hear how to. ROI from another channel. Social media.

It’s the Okta Triumph.

Can you imagine if you’re in charge, if you’re the CMO of marketing Paris, what are your main channels? Wow, there’s. The arc of Triumph. There’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s the Louv. Those are your channels you’re gonna use to drive tourism dollars in. Okay, now, but you’re not the CMO of Paris. In fact, you’re the CMO of your company product service.

So what are your main channels? So I’m gonna guess there are things like Paper click, maybe Trade Joe’s events. Maybe content. Those are all pretty predictable, right? Let me ask you this question. Are you treating social media as a main channel? By the way, only 1.8% of you today measure social media and can prove an ROI in that investment.

HubSpot and Gartner say, Social media is the number one channel to invest in this year. Are you doing it? If not, I can tell you why you’re not doing it. Because you don’t have the tools, you don’t have the mentality, and that’s okay. We’ve got you covered. You changed the mentality. We’ll give you the tool.

We Pulse tracks all the ROI for you. One place to manage all your social media activity, your number one channel, change your success. Treat social media as a channel one CMO to another. My name is Daryl. I’m with the Holtz. I’ll talk.

All right, Josh, this is so interesting. Can you share just like two or three examples of some of the influencer marketing initiatives that you’ve seen from brands recently that kind of grabbed your attention and what was it that interested?

[00:24:43] Geoffroy Robin: Sure. So I’ll, I’ll start with the, uh, the celebrity. So the influencer, celebrity Jennifer Garner.

So we’re lucky to have been working with Jennifer Garner and her team at, uh, once Upon a Farm. So it’s a great example. So Jennifer Garner was actually the host of her, uh, first Once Upon a Farm Evans, and so. You know, Jennifer Garner, you know, the following she can have on social media. And the interesting point is that she did not use Instagram to go live.

She really used live scale on the website to really, uh, drive this awareness of live shopping and create this event. So that’s a good example of even a celebrity that has a strong community will not use social media to go live. They really want to go live. The brand property on the brand website using a platform that can allow her to do so.

And that was, I think, an amazing event. And we saw, uh, other examples of that, A celebrity, again, relying on their team and their brand to really host a live on the brand website rather than on social and leverage on social more to do the promotion and the activation part. So that will. My first event, and Jennifer, if you’re listening to that, thanks again.

Amazing experience.

[00:25:49] Mike Allton: It was great. I watched it live and I recall thinking that their in studio production seemed to be pretty minimal. They were in a kitchen, I think they had like maybe two different camera angles. Yeah. So two different camera set up and that was it. It wasn’t that e. [00:26:05] Geoffroy Robin: Yeah, she coasted it with a, with one of her, uh, partner within the company.

So the product for those who are not familiar with ones upon a farm, it’s baby food basically. So, uh, it’s, it’s very specific, very niche product, but they also show the diversity what live shopping is bringing and touching in terms of friend industry and products. So that’s, uh, yeah, that’s a, again, a great example here.

[00:26:24] Mike Allton: Yeah. And just to give folks listening, just a little added color, what Jennifer and her co-host did was they sampled. The baby food products. Mm-hmm. And they, and they were some pretty crazy, I don’t remember the flavors, but it’s not like, you know, apricots or anything like that. It’s different. So they were simply organic ing what

they

[00:26:40] Geoffroy Robin: thought.

Yeah. And all organic products.

[00:26:41] Mike Allton: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very cool. Now, on the other hand, we all know we’ve had influencer marketing campaigns that can go wrong. Right? What’s the worst maybe that you’ve seen and what could the brand have done differently? Yeah. [00:26:54] Geoffroy Robin: Well, at Livescale we tend to see that, uh, among our clients, never something goes wrong.

It’s more about getting learnings of how you can improve. So again, it’s a different way of saying things, but what we’ve seen though is that this client that absolutely wanted a big celebr. It’s not Jennifer, just talk about her. So that’s not who I’m talking about. So another client wanted to use a big celebrity and we told them, don’t use the celebrity.

We don’t think it’s a good match for what you’re trying to achieve there. Because that concept was really about telling the story of the brand and they were presenting actually a new collection of product and we. We recommended them not to use this celebrity because, uh, there, there wouldn’t be a good match from our point of view.

And they still use this celebrity. So for sure they got massive audiences, but that’s not the KPIs that set up in terms of success for the events they were looking at a lot of engagement, a lot of, uh, sort. On live scale, you have lots of features like pauses in order to generate data. So that’s also one of the benefits of live shopping for sure you can sell, but also connect additional data about this.

So at the end, the clients was very really disappointed by the event itself because it did not translate into a lot of engagement. A lot of the data they were able to collect from the audience and even less sales. But for sure the celebrity that shows, uh, was definitely not linked to the brand. The, the celebrity didn’t have any affinity.

She was very popular. Still popular though, but very popular at that time. So that’s why what they, they wanted to work with them. But to your point and your question earlier about the choice of influencer, don’t only choose influencers that are like trendy or, uh, you think are the big audiences, et cetera.

Obviously your selection of influencers, especially for live shopping events, should go, uh, even deeper into that. Yeah, that, that will be a, the example of things that in between quotes went wrong, even if, again, lots of learnings. The brand kept doing live shopping events afterwards, but with different host, different concepts.

[00:28:46] Mike Allton: That is a fantastic example and a great lesson. I talk about something very similar that happened in the very, very early days of influencer market. We’re going back over a hundred years now, before there was such a thing as influencer marketing. Yeah. Back then, the Conklin Penn Company in Toledo, Ohio, they wanted to promote their Penn, and if they’d had been like every other company back then, they would’ve used a major league baseball player like Babe Ruth.

Who has nothing to do with pens, but he’s just a celebrity at the time. And people thought, well, maybe if we tie it to Babe Ruth, they’ll buy pens. But Conlan knew better. Conlan said, no, no, we wanna use someone that everyday folks would pay attention to. So they tapped Mark Twain and they had Mark Twain endorsed their pens.

He was a prolific author. Everybody in the country, Nu Mark Twain, and they could easily see him. His thoughts. There’s a pun there for you. Yeah. With their pen. So that was fantastic and And what a great example, a brand that, yeah. Should have listened to you and learned their lesson. I love that. Now, I gotta ask, and I ask this in every episode because I don’t know what people are gonna say, but I have an idea and I just love listening to the different answers.

How important is it for brands to develop relationships with influencers?

[00:30:00] Geoffroy Robin: Between, uh, not important and very important, I will say important. So it’s important to build a long lasting relationship with influencers. After that, what we’ve tend to see for the past month and even years is, um, what I hope is a new era of influencer marketing and even social media in general.

So for me, we’re, we’ve entered, again, I hope it’s going to continue like this, but a more authentic era when it comes to social media. The relationship with influencers that you build makes even more sense to choose the right one and to establish really this long-term relationship. Because if you find an influencer that really matches your brand, D n A, your brand objective expectation as well, if you find this influencer being very, also very creative, but very enthusiast when it comes to joining you for influencer marketing activities, whether it’s live shopping or something else.

Yeah, you have to stick and you have to keep doing this. But yeah, to my point about entering this new, uh, social media era as a social media user and a medic to social media, medic to digital in general, but I’m happy to see that again, we’re starting to enter this and I think that the choice of influencers that.

As a user, you follow, another brand you will choose will make even more sense now and in the future. Now without, we’re entering again this more authentic phase of social media. So less Photoshop images, uh, less, uh, less fake followers, fake account, et cetera. But again, more authenticity, more reality of the world as well.

When you see apps like Burial being used a lot by teenagers, uh, gen Z, and even Generation Alpha now about posting what you do at this instant moment, I think we’re heading in the right direction. The choice of influencers, again, should be really linked to your brand DNA and what you wanna do there, and also match what the user’s expectations are evolving now in this social media space.

[00:31:49] Mike Allton: I couldn’t

agree more. We are absolutely going into a new era. Exactly as you described, authenticity is so much more important today than it was before, and it’s gonna continue to rise in importance, which means developing relationships with influencers who can be an authentic partner. Yeah. For the brand is invaluable, Josh.

That’s fantastic. What final advice do you have for brands who wanna leverage influencers to reach new audiences?

[00:32:14] Geoffroy Robin: Yeah, I, I’ll say again, take time, do some test and learn as well. If we, uh, go back to like 10, 15 years ago when, uh, social media arrived and where I would say the influencer marketing subject started, that’s what we did as well.

So we picked and chose the influencers, and we tested different creatives. And, and at the end you kept working with an entrance that, that made sense. And then where you saw some reach, we saw an evolution on the mindset when it comes to, uh, the ROI as well. We mentioned this earlier. Uh, at the beginning it was all.

Each, how many people can you reach? Then we realize that, yeah, but there’s some fake followers. So maybe the rich is not the, the KPI I want to measure as part of my success. Then I wanna see the clicks through, right? Yeah. But the clicks, sometimes they’re the fake clicks as well. So I wanna see the sales.

So now I think we’re at a point where when it comes to inference of marketing, we’ve reached and brands of rich maturity where they, they know what they wanna have when it comes to your expectation from this. So, Set your expectation right when it comes to the choice of the influencer that you wanna work with.

Make sure obviously that this influencer matches your brand dna, matches your audience expectation as well. And then build this relationship o over the long term. Because again, shortterm R I is exists also on, on influencer marketing, obviously, but it’s more the midterm and long-term, right, that you’ll be looking at while working with influencer.

[00:33:33] Mike Allton: Such fantastic advice over and over again. You’ve been suggesting and imploring everybody listening to think long term. Yeah. With your influencers. Love it. Can you tell folks where they can find you if they wanna reach out, learn more about you or life scale? [00:33:46] Geoffroy Robin: Yeah, sure. So Livescale, you can find us on the livescale.tv, so where the website where obvious on social medias.

Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, uh, even TikTok. So yeah, you can find us there for sure. Feel free to to reach out. You can see my first name, last name on LinkedIn as well. So feel free to connect on LinkedIn, uh, and ask any question there. And yeah, looking forward to discussing with you more about, uh, influencer marketing and live shopping in general.

Really happy.

[00:34:11] Mike Allton: Awesome. Thank you so much Geoff. Thank you everyone else for listening. That’s all we’ve got for today, friends, so please follow us on Apple. Need the podcast review. Let us know what you think. We always like to hear from you. Till next time,

thank you for listening to another episode of Partnership Unpacked, hosted by Mike Alton, empowered by I Agora Pulse, the number one rated social media management solution, which you can learn more about at I Agora. Dot com. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favorite podcast player. Be sure to leave us a review.

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