EPISODE 227: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Jennifer Quigley-Jones

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Jennifer Quigley-Jones for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Jennifer and here’s what we discussed about-

1. Define and track ROAS and CAC metrics each quarter.

2. Act as a strategic partner, not just a service provider.

3. Leverage YouTube for stronger ROI over Instagram stories.

4. Maintain brand approval rights and content licensing in influencer deals.

5. Integrate influencer campaigns with CRO, microsites, and analytics.

6. Recognize lost credit when consumers act outside tracked funnels.

About our host:

Randy Rayess is the co-founder of Outgrow.co, a platform designed to help marketers create highly interactive web and social experiences to drive referral traffic and lead generation. With a background in venture capital, private equity, and startups focusing on financial services, transaction processing, and machine learning, He is passionate about leveraging technology to transform marketing strategies. He believes in shifting from traditional advertising to creating valuable tools and experiences for customers. 

About our guest:

Jennifer Quigley-Jones is the CEO of Digital Voices, an award-winning Influencer Marketing agency she founded in 2017 with just a £500 personal investment. She is passionate about empowering the next wave of entrepreneurs and frequently speaks at international events like TEDx, SXSW, and Web Summit.

Why Lazy Ads Deserve to Be Skipped: The Creator-First Approach to ROI

The Intro!

Randy Rayess: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Randy Rayess, and I’m the co-founder at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to interview Jennifer Quigley-Jones who is the CEO & Founder, Digital Voices.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Great to be here. Thank you.

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Challenge yourself with this trivia about the exciting topics Jennifer Quigley-Jones covered in the podcast.

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The Big Questions!

Randy Rayess: Welcome everyone to Marketer of the Month. Today we have a special guest at South by Southwest in Austin. And Jennifer is coming from Digital Voices, which is an influencer marketing agency, and she’s gonna give us a much better introduction to what you do and what makes you different.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: So thank you for having me. Also, this is the most effortless podcast I’ve been on, so Digital Voices is a global influencer marketing agency that drives growth for brands and really thinks about how influencers can drive results at every stage of the funnel. So is that an awareness campaign where we guarantee impressions results? Right. Which is what we do to brands. If we don’t hit our impressions numbers, we will either commission more content from our agency fee until we do, or we will give back some of that agency fee to the brand. Wow. Because our job as your agency partner is to know the data and to get it right. But you can also use influencer marketing to drive kind of app downloads sales or lower-funnel metrics. And so for that, we set a benchmark every quarter that’s like, this is the number, the ROAS number, the CAT number that we should hit. And if we don’t hit that, you can terminate your agreement with us, because again, we should be working in the same direction. And I think the influence marketing industry has grown a lot in the last decade, but it has been still the financial model, the commercial model of it doesn’t work well for brands. People are either still just randomly taking a percentage of the fee, or they are guaranteeing a minimum number of creators, or they are charging an hourly rate for their time. And that to me is based on a broken agency model that doesn’t think about your agency as a true strategic partner. So that’s where digital Voices comes in a bit differently. I had never worked in advertising before founding the agency. Wow. Eight years ago this month. So I worked at e YouTube for two years, and then I saw there was a real gap in how brands could engage with creators because everyone was just doing Instagram influencer marketing at the time, and they were doing stories and realized YouTube was where people watching content for the longest period of time. And also it’s driving far more sales than Instagram. So I left YouTube, started my company by myself at 26 with like 500 pounds, $700, and just started freelancing and working with brands. And since then we’ve kind of expanded to the us. We run campaigns in 36 markets. We have 19 languages on the team. We work with incredible brands like DoorDash, Unilever, Adobe, and PepsiCo. We have offices in the US and the UK and we’ve built our own tech. But all of that came from that kind of initial investment and initially seeing the gap that brands really don’t have an influencer partner who thinks about driving their growth.

Randy Rayess: That’s great. That’s a really interesting model. I do agree that the challenge is with figuring out, what is my return on ad spend. And not just, okay, I’m paying my retainer fee, I’m paying my hourly rate, I’m paying the influencer fee. And then it’s like, what am I getting out of this? And I think that’s a challenge. One of the things that we kind of see a lot of people struggle with is they’ll come and they’ll be like, okay, I want to do like an affiliate model with an influencer. And I’m like, well, okay. From the influencer standpoint, that’s not the best for them because they want to get the money upfront. From the band standpoint, it’s good ’cause like, oh, now they’re only getting paid for like conversion. So how do you guys see that model?

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: I mean, talking about flawed models, I think the affiliate model is really flawed as well. The affiliate model for brands means that influencers, the only ones who say yes to that will be creators who do not get enough brand deals. Oh. The reason they don’t get enough brand deals is that they often don’t convert. Oh. They also will deprioritize that brand deal. So if they have something that comes in that pays upfront, you’ll get dropped Black Friday, how do you think you’re gonna get cut through? True, true, true. It’s really great for publishers who produce so much content. Right. But I think for influencers, especially the ones who produce quality content, it’s really hard. Also as a brand with affiliates, you don’t get the right of approval. So you don’t have the right to approve that content to make sure it hits your talking points. You don’t often have the right to use that content in paid ads as well unless you pay a fee. So our model often sits at the upfront fee. Okay. At some, like some degree of upfront fee, it can be minimized and there can be an affiliate percentage of the spend. But we think that if you really want to keep control and to get results that are going to really drive impact for your brand, you should be paying something upfront. Right. I also think it’s a privilege for me as a marketer, but also for brands. This is one of the few industries where you can know your spending is going to democratize and empower entrepreneurs. At a really micro scale. Yeah. So if you think about S-E-O-P-P-C, paid ads, marketing, you know, your money is going to the big platforms, which is great. But with influences, we know that approximately 70 cents on every dollar spent with us is going directly to an entrepreneur who would not have existed if this creative economy did not exist. Right. And those entrepreneurs, often people who would never have been entrepreneurs in the past, can be disabled people making videos at home. They can be single mothers making content that’s flexible around having kids. Right. They can be like someone making metalwork in a garage. Right. And like creating this content that is insane. Insanely good. And that connects with communities in again, ways media’s never done before. Correct. So as a brand and a marketer and an agency, there is so much for privilege and power in knowing that your fee Yeah. Goes to building that perfect business.

Randy Rayess: That’s an interesting point. And then do you feel like, so you know, there’s, there’s a huge range of possible things you can market. So if someone’s selling like chocolate, right? And it’s like a $4 transaction size versus someone selling a purse, which is like a thousand dollars transaction size, the cost per impression you might be willing to pay might be different per thousand impressions might be different. So do you kind of, do influencers come and be like, okay, because they probably don’t price based on your product size or your product pricing, they probably price say, okay, we’re gonna charge $3 for a thousand impressions and you gotta pay that 3000. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling chocolate or you’re selling purses. And so then on the, on the brand side, it’s like, well, okay, our, you know, revenue per a thousand impressions, if it’s a small transaction size might only be $4. Or like, how do you then manage that situation where you have a cost of a thousand impressions, which is so close to the revenue that they’re expecting? How do you manage that? 

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: And take it even further, imagine B2B one of our clients is Microsoft. Oh wow. For B2B for like Microsoft yeah. Teams and forum co-pilot. Oh, nice. Again, for them it’s not, it’s not the views, it’s the cost per transaction. Right. Exactly. And that transaction might take a year for someone to decide. Correct. And they’re trying to reach one decision-maker. Right. So I think being honest, this isn’t on the influencer. You are Right. The influencer charges for the work they do, but influencer pricing is the wild wild west. Yeah. Like I did a poll once on Twitter back before it was X. So when I left YouTube, My job at YouTube was to help creators grow their audience online and grow their YouTube channels. Right. So I had a lot of creator connections. So I raised this poll that was like, how do you decide what you charge for a brand deal? And the most popular answer by far over a thousand creators answered. And the most popular was, I take the highest amount I’ve ever been paid and I ask for that amount of money. Interesting. They don’t think about the day rate, they don’t think about the time they think about what is an industry willing to pay. And this is where as a brand you can really easily slip up because standardizing it isn’t gonna happen in the next three years. Like this is always gonna be kind of a quagmire As a brand, you can come in through a different, a couple of different approaches.

And as an agency founder, we have a couple of different ideas. So firstly you can look at what is your customer impression target. So if you’re trying to sell chocolate bars, you might think, Hmm, no one’s really gonna order this online. I know I want people to go into Target and buy the chocolate bars. I’m gonna think about awareness. So then you look at it on a cost-per-impression basis. Our model is that we guarantee those results. We’ll guarantee those impressions. So when we select creators based on is their audience the right fit, like demographics wise, is their audience the right fit? Does their data match Right? Historically, have they performed well? Are their engagement rates strong? Are they brand-safe? Can they produce the creative we need? We will then set their fee based on we know we’ve guaranteed this many impressions for the campaign. We have to split the budget this way. So we predict their number of views. Correct. And then we pay them a percentage of the fee based on that. I see. I see. And then if they over-perform, amazing. But that’s how we plan it. Do it. And I think brands could do that in-house as well. Yeah. But then you’ve got kind of a more complex situation where say you’re trying to sell like that handbag and if your target is lower funnel. So if you’re trying to sell handbags, trying to sell a car, it’s a very different situation. Or if, okay. The best example for this would be if you are cut out with that, I said, or you’ve got the other situation where you’re trying to sell a product. So if one of our clients surf Shark or a VPN company, they’re a cyber security company, they know they need the return on their investment to be a certain amount. Right. So we will set a fee and then for the first trial we’ll see how many sales that drives. I see. If that drives enough sales that it justifies keeping working with them, great. We’ll try and sign them up for a long-term deal. They might even be able to raise the price in that long-term deal. ’cause They’re like, look, you want to work with us? I’m clearly driving sales. However, if that person, their fee is too high and it doesn’t drive sales, we don’t work with them again. Yeah. Or we’ll offer them a lower fee and be like, Hey, we’d love to keep working with you. It only makes sense for the brand if it’s this fee. And so you can do it and you have to be, I think, willing to test and learn. So you have to have test budgets. Yeah. But then you can kind of create a rough science. Sound it. Yeah.

Randy Rayess: That’s interesting. So one of the questions I had is like, you’re coming in, you’re doing okay, cost per impression, X dollars. You’re trying to think through, okay, what’s my revenue per impression? Thousand impressions. Ideally, you’re trying to figure out, back out as a brand, you’re trying to back out so what’s revenue per dollar spent? Even better because then you know, for cost, and so then you’re saying, well, the challenge is that sometimes you’re, it’s not immediately trackable. So like if someone, if someone posted a video and then they forward the video or they sell someone else, Hey, check this out on Microsoft Teams or, or on Slack or whatever, they tell someone, Hey, can you check this out? That doesn’t get credit. Yeah. Like, you saw them on the video so you don’t get credit. So then you’re when you back out, you’re like, oh, I made, you know, a hundred dollars off this or whatever, a thousand dollars off this ad, but there’s like a thousand, a thousand dollars of spend that actually happened that I couldn’t figure out because it happened not on directly.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: So I think this is where again, the influencer marketing industry really needs to step up. And one of the things that I’m really proud of, about running Digital Voices, I feel like we’re consistently pushing the industry to be better. Okay. So we started guaranteeing those views eight years ago. Yeah. And there are a couple of people who’ve copied it and I’m like, come on, keep copying, keep copying our model. Keep stepping up. Yes. One of the things that we do that I think is very different from the industry is we don’t think about the traffic in terms of just how it did on the social media platforms. You’ll have agencies that email brands and they say, Hey, we worked together once, and look, that video got 2 million views and the brand’s like, we don’t care. It didn’t drive sales. Right. Our approach is, we are gonna help the brand maximize the performance of that traffic. So we ask for Google Analytics and Shopify data from our clients. We help with conversion rate optimization, we help design microsites, and we help do tracking. We have data like we have Looker Studio dashboards that track that you can literally click and customize to see what happened with your, with your traffic. Did they purchase, or did they not? And I think that’s where the influencer industry is going to need, an agency to justify their existence. And the way they can do that is by actually being a true brand partner who looks at the real return ads spend results. Yeah. And I think a lot of influencer agencies have been trying to, they’ve been growing based on the fact the industry is doing well, they’ve been riding the wave, it’s great. But in the long term for brands, like, why am I not gonna build an in-house team? Why would I use you? Yeah. If you’re not helping them hit their bottom line, if you’re not helping them with performance, if you’re not investing in tech and data analytics, you’re gonna lose Yeah. You’re gonna lose them. Yeah. And rightly so. Yeah. ’cause You kind of need to be better.

Randy Rayess: I find it kind of interesting ’cause I’ve seen some people kind of do this where they’re like, oh, they’re concerned that like the tracking isn’t working as well. And they do this a lot on podcasts. They give like unique codes or you know, on TikTok, they give you unique codes and then you can now after the unique code, you can track it and you have some track. So if I’m forwarding to a friend. Nice. Send.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: It’s interesting. So even the best clients, we have clients who have seamless customer journeys and they have trackable discount codes. When we do a halo effect analysis, that halo effect with these clients who have, seem like they have a custom microsite, everything is with the influencer face on everything is tailored, they still find a 40% minimum halo effect. So 40% of those sales are unattributed. Wow. So an extra 40, imagine you are a luxury travel brand. Imagine you’re a luxury handbag brand or something that, where it’s a considered purchase, you are looking at over a hundred percent of your sales not attributed to the interesting and huge halo effect. Right. So it’s really interesting. I think brands also need to think about brand lift surveys, purchase lift surveys, looking at search traffic, and literally doing analysis on the traffic’s behavior on their site to try and see if influencers having a disproportionate impact that is not being measured through discount code redemptions alone. Interesting. For example, we worked with a brand and we worked with a brand and they were only measuring the impact of the coupon codes. Right. Oh, okay. We were looking at pixel data. So we used influence and paid ads as well. So we were looking at pixel data. Our data showed 10% of the cost compared to the discount code redemptions, as in we were getting a cost per customer of $82. They thought if you looked at it based on the discount code redemptions, it was a thousand dollars. Oh wow. So there is a huge, and that, again, very smart brand in terms of conversion that was

Randy Rayess: Over 10 x insane.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: 10 x of the customers are being missed because you are looking at it through two narrow lenses. You are not looking at literally doing a site analysis of what the traffic’s doing and who’s converting and how. 

Randy Rayess: So the dark social, the dark traffic, which you can’t really figure out. It’s like, I can’t see it, but I know it’s there in it. 

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: And the weird thing is, if you give your partner agency or internally your data team or your analytics team the time and knows this is happening, they can track it. They can track it much better. They can’t track it perfectly. They can track it better. And I think it’s just where brands are so stretched and influencer teams also aren’t often the most fluent in data that they’re being kind of set up to fail. Right.

Randy Rayess: So interesting. So our last thing on this topic is, it’s just an interesting topic because it’s one of those fields which I feel that over time it’s gonna get optimized in some way. Oh, I hope so. Yeah. And then, the last one specifically on pricing is if you’re in B2B and you’re, you know, software company like Microsoft or you’re a smaller software company like a startup and you’re trying to think through, okay, I know my sales cycle is four months mm-hmm <affirmative>. And I’m gonna need to figure out the value that this campaign is producing in less than four months. Or if it’s six months, I wanna, I wanna figure it out in three months so that I’m not bumping six months worth of money into an influencer that’s not working. And then six months later I find out actually it’s gonna work. So how do you kind of talk to B2B and say, okay, look, we’re not gonna know for sure in six to six months, but we can kind of use these proxies or, or how do you kinda think it’s through?

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: B2B is really interesting because B2B in my perspective is about really, really smart strategic thinking and strategic campaigns because it’s very rare that there’ll be one YouTube video, one LinkedIn post that makes the key decision maker and c-suite of a company convert. What you can do is use that content to get them bought into an email list to get ’em bought into coming into the event to get them signed up to speak something. Right. You know, to get, so this is where I think, again, most influencer marketing agencies just think about, here’s an ad asset or here’s a piece of content. But actually what you need to do is think about the strategic journey. So if there was a B2B campaign, we ran for a company called Fast Hosts. Really weird. This is weird. Okay. Fast Hosts is a cloud cloud computing solution. They needed to reach only UK Chief Technology officers making these buying decisions. Interesting. We said to them, I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to do this just with influence. They were like, we are so confident if you get them on our email list, we can sell to them. It’ll take time, but we can sell to them. So we designed an entire campaign around how do you get these very specific people to also, who are very discerning about data and very discerning about tracking. How do you get them to feel like they’re opting in and excited to be communicated to by the brand? So we created something called the Techie Test a couple of years ago. So we took an interest in number files, like geeky content creators, and number file engineering channels. Tom’s got like people who produce content that’s like, what would you know about the world? Like learning something new that we thought would have a connection with the audience. And we had them create the techie test. And in 60 seconds of their YouTube video, they set their own question. That was a technical question that they had created. They said if you are based in the UK and can answer this question, sign up through this email, give the right answer and you win. They did it for two years. The first year the prize was tickets to South by Southwest. Wow. And the second year, the price was a $7,000 work-from-home. Your dream work-from-home computer set up seven. The first year we got 10,000 entries, which UK technical people. Wow. I mean, really interesting. 

Randy Rayess: That’s really segmented. 

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: It turns out though, these technical people are often socially introverted, so they didn’t necessarily want to come south by Southwest. Oh, I see. So the next year when we did the dream work-from-home setup, we got 40,000 email addresses. Wow. And, and the brand then did the analysis. They were like those people who signed up to an email address, they opened at a higher rate the emails we sent them than our average consumers or anyone from other channels. And they were actually better quality than from paid. They were better quality than those from interesting event signups. So it’s so interesting, like if you get it right, you can really encourage the right people to opt in and build this stream into your brand. Interesting. But it takes so much strategic work, like technical questions, setting up the sites, like all this stuff, but it works. Yeah. So I think you just need to be really smart with how you approach B2B. Yeah. And that’s where, again, a lot of influencer agencies, will cut the cost of analytics. They’ll cut the cost of strategists because they’re like vending machines. Yeah, yeah. You put money in, you get creators out, and they’ll work with whoever is cheapest and quickest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we won’t do that. It’s like about succeeding. Right. By being strategic. 

Randy Rayess: That story is amazing, by the way. I love that story. That’s a great one. Because it’s unique and it brings so many things together and it is just like a cool story. Thank you. So I liked it a lot there.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Super geeky, but No, it’s so funny. People think of fashion and beauty when they think of influencers and I’m like, no, give me a geeky brand. 

Randy Rayess: Yeah. Well, it also gives you the opportunity to do something unique, right? If you’re doing, because like, probably like in e-commerce it’s been done so many times. Like there’s only so many things you can do in fashion and math ’cause there’s so much that’s done. So to get something really, really unique is hard. Yeah. Whereas in this case you’re, you were saying, I’m gonna bring kind of creative thinking and do it in a field that doesn’t have a lot of creative thinking. So now it’s like really unique in doing tests or contests or things like that. We see that a lot on our end. Like we have like outro agro contests that people build and we’ve had outgrow contests for, you know, merch for sports, for NBA teams football teams. And they’re able to get a lot more information because they’re running these campaigns and now they figure out, oh, okay, I don’t just know that you like our brand, but I know you like LeBron James. Yes. I know what you like specifically because of how you’re answering and which contests you’re entering. That’s so clever. So you’re opting in now I know more about you. So it’s kind of like, that’s like clever.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: And I think we’re gonna see that more in 2025. I think. We’re entering a time of real economic uncertainty and we know the cost of living is gonna go up, inflation’s gonna increase. Yeah. Tariffs mean increased prices. So in that context, it is more important than ever for brands to cultivate brand loyalty. Because why, when someone has an alternative that is half the price, why did they choose you? Right. And so I think we’re going into a year where brands are really gonna have to celebrate their consumers through rewarding them and through creating that loyalty. Right. So brands are gonna have to be smarter than ever in doing that in their marketing. It’s like Taco Bell featuring their customers in the Super Bowl ad. Right? Yeah. And I think like, yeah, okay. Taco Bell’s a sexy brand that has like access to that, but so do B2B brands. Yeah. Like it’s true. How are you gonna celebrate your consumers? How are you gonna make the price inelastic to your product? And I think that’s true. Smart strategic thinking. The rewards a consumer for being part of the community. 

Randy Rayess: That’s a cool one.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Once we went, we went deep.

Randy Rayess: Yeah. I liked it. I liked it a lot. Thanks, Holly. We have a few more questions and then and then I’ll, we’ll, we’ll be done. So the next one is around well we kind about your YouTube journey. I know you’re on YouTube and you’ve probably seen YouTube go from a small platform to what it is today where you have, it’s a beast. How do you think through kind of YouTube’s evolution and then you can cover everything from creator monetization to influencer marketing to whatever you think is interesting about YouTube’s evolution?,

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: So I was YouTube coming up to a decade ago, which means before really old. And my job was to help creators grow their channels. Yeah. And back then YouTube was, you know, short it was long-form video. Yeah. That was it. The thing I think they’ve kept really consistent and done really well is that creator monetization piece. Right. They have been consistently where YouTube, where creators can make great ad revenue and can build their business through revenue. Whereas I think Instagram and TikTok always kind of relied on brand deals as well. Right. Which is fine. It’s it’s a great model. But I think we’ve seen a real shift in YouTube with, well, one, they’ve become so much more sophisticated that’s platform. They’re using AI for media buying like Right. YouTube is for an ads pack that they’re really evolving and they’re looking at using creators in their ads. Secondly, they’re doing a lot of short-form content with YouTube shorts. And I think for the user experience, sometimes that can be a little bit convoluted, but they are seeing sticky user experience from YouTube shorts, which is attracting creators from TikTok over to YouTube and kind of also giving creators a way to make the most out of their platform. And I think thirdly, they’re seeing a lot of mileage with podcasting, which again like Spotify and YouTube both really went into video podcasting really quickly and really heavily, I think they’ve just said, isn’t it like more than a billion monthly users on the crazy podcast? It’s crazy. And I think that’s amazing. But the thing I find interesting about that as someone who runs an influence marketing agency is the shift from podcasts where you could not click from listening to it in the audio straight through to a site. You’d have to maybe remember a code or remember messaging very hard. And they’re very saturated with ad content. You could do five ad reads in a row and they’re scripted. And I’m like, what is this? To at least from a YouTube video, a long-form video, you can directly click on a site. Right. So I think we’re gonna see far more brands getting into that space and looking at how they, ’cause it’s so much more trackable. Right. So I think that podcasting growth is really gonna offer an avenue for a lot of brands to play with podcasting in a measurable way that they have. Correct.

Randy Rayess: That’s an interesting thing about podcasting. I found that now because you can skip 15 seconds forward on a podcast. Oh yeah. Just, and yeah. People, everyone, everyone I see like skips the 15 sec, they, they, they know okay, it’s gonna be two minutes of, or three minutes of interview of, of ads and each one’s gonna be 30 seconds or 25 seconds. Yeah. So they just skip through it all. I’m like, wait, how many people paid for those ads? And they’re not getting any listens. 

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: But I also think they’re doing it in such like, I’ll be honest, a how honest will I be crammed? I’ll be honest. I think a lot of the, again, podcasting agencies are literally just selling scripts. Stack them high, and sell cheap. Do you know what I mean? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas the way we’ve been doing sponsored long-form integrations and YouTube videos is Sarah is a brand that really has to think about, they’re the only sponsor for that video and they have to think about how it’s relevant and think about how it plays in, like for Surf Shark, we have creators in shark costumes. We had someone who built a Massive Shark they could surf on. Like it’s crazy. And I think we’ve had people do animation like that’s, or comedy skits like all of that content has to be tailored to that specific video. Right. And I think that’s where you see conversions. ’cause It’s entertaining. Right. I think when you’ve got these podcast agencies that give 500 creators a script that’s the same. Yeah. Like they’re doing no onboarding work. No tailoring it, no creative work.

Randy Rayess: No personalization. It’s just the same thing for everyone. 

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: So of course people are skipping it because your creativity is lazy. Yeah. You deserve to have your ad skipped. You are going for the cheapest people. You are working with people who are putting no time into your partnership. They’re literally basically mass emailing scripts. You deserve to fail. I’m sorry, that is creatively boring. Agency work is lazy as a brand. Do better.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: That’s why I think podcasting has a lot of opportunity, but it’s just hard.

Randy Rayess: I think it’s hard. Part of it’s because of that. And the second part is you said it’s like if I’m on a drive to work, I’m not gonna like, like stop, stop. Like on a red light or go Fight Park. I’m gonna write down the name of this, it’s hard to do. Exactly. So you know, people default to this. So I think that’s another thing that, that makes YouTube interesting is that you can now, at least the people who are listening on YouTube, obviously the people listening on Spotify then drive to work. You’re probably not gonna get them on that conversion. You might get them on a second, listen later on. But on that first, listen, you’re probably not getting that conversion. So. Exactly. That’s interesting. The last thing I was gonna mention was the identification and selection. You briefly mentioned it when you were trying to figure out, okay, I wanna identify and select influencers, and do you kind of think, okay we have a target audience in this country and we’re gonna, and,

we’re gonna only focus on TikTok or only do YouTube? Or do you kind of think through it from the sense of like, we’re just focused on the audience, let’s really drill down the audience, and then we’re gonna find the people who focus on that audience regardless of their platform, regardless of what they do.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: There are a couple of different ways to do it, but both focus on the audience first. So a brand will tell us who their target customer is and we will either look at that demographics or we will find creators out. If we have a tool a partner tool, we use Captivate actually as a partner sourcing tool that has data on millions of creators and it’ll tell you who their audience is. So if a brand wants to reach men aged 30 to 35 in Utah, we can find out which creators reach that audience. Interesting. And then we’ll tailor the creative to ’em. Interesting. the other thing you can do is if a brand is really sophisticated, often they think about it from a community perspective. Which communities do they want to speak with? So are our audience Dungeons and Traffic fans, are they LeBron James fans? Interesting. And then we can find creators who speak to that audience as well. Interesting. and then the other thing we have is that Digital Voice has built a proprietary AI tool called Composer that we use for planning. And it takes, ’cause as I’ve mentioned, we have all this performance data for the last eight years of campaigns. Yeah. We know which creators drive sales. So we decided, and which creators have really highly engaged audiences. So we decided to take, that all that data and build with a Google Vertex. And so we build a tool that helps you, helps us planning. So it’ll suggest which verticals work best, and which platforms which creative. Interesting. And so then we kind of layer that over the top. And by the time we give a brand a list of creators to choose from, we explain why we’re using them. We give them all their audience demos and we explain if they’ve converted to a previous campaign. But it means we’re making the smartest decisions with which creators to select and which approach to take. Interesting. So that we’re maximizing the brand’s chance of performance success. 

Randy Rayess: Makes sense.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: I’ve wanted to build this for years that AI wasn’t there until like last year. So I’m like, clearly it’s the thing you had in your brain is that possible?

Randy Rayess: It’s possible now. Yeah, exactly. It’s possible now. And is there a way to kind of, so like some people they, they kind of will do a campaign and they’re like, oh, this person usually has so many views and then they found out that the people buy views. Yeah. Or like they kind of fake it some way. And so then they kind of, and then when you get your numbers, like, oh, usually if I’m getting this number of impressions, I’m getting this many clicks or whatever might be, and then they realize for some creators that’s not the case and some people are saying maybe it’s the wrong creator. And second is maybe those aren’t real views. Yeah. So how do you kinda manage them, where you think you’re getting all these views but then you realize those aren’t legitimate?

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Yeah, I think you can. So this is the problem. When brands try to get creators to guarantee a minimum number of views, we don’t pass the guarantee requirements onto creators. Oh. For us, we guarantee it for the campaign as a whole based on our data. It’s not in the creative contracts because that incentivizes creators to buy fake views. I see. You don’t want them to. I see. It’s also interesting, like you can see through the data, through like the audience watch time. You can help the engagement rate if it’s fake. And also the demographics of those views. Like if you are at all curious to see if someone’s lying, ask for the breakdown of the viewers for that individual video. If they’re buying fake views, it’ll be from a country that is different to them America. 

Randy Rayess: Oh yeah. You don’t buy, you do country breakdown.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: I like that. Yeah. You don’t buy a million fake views from America. True. But I think that’s really interesting as well. Like when we are often working with companies who are trying to push sales or a lower funnel metric, we don’t actually want more views. We want the creator’s core audience to see the content because those are the ones who trust that creator enough to convert. So we’ve got a lot of data on like, if a piece of content goes viral, does the sales number really increase? And the answer is no. Interesting. ’cause you might know about a brand for the first time, but you don’t trust that creator. You don’t trust the brand. That’s the people who are like, I skipped through it. I see. But if you’re a truly loyal fan of that creator and you watch all their stuff Right? Then you’re like, oh, maybe I do wanna buy this product.

Randy Rayess: Because I trust the person. 

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Interesting. Yeah. So I, I think don’t put anything in a contract that would incentivize fake for you buying. ’cause You’re kind of asking to be lied to.

Randy Rayess: You’re like, I want 10,000 views like I have 9,000. I’m gonna add a thousand because you otherwise you’re gonna, yeah. So then you have this, you don’t wanna give them incentives to like, also that’s

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Play around their control. Like, it’s so unfair. It’s true. They make the content if you’re happy with the content. 

Randy Rayess: That’s a risky take. It’s true. It is hard for them because at the end of the day, creators like, you know, they don’t know. Sometimes you have seen creators who’d like to change the title, they have the same exact video, they change the title and it skyrockets their views. Yeah. There’s the same content or change the thumbnail. Yeah. Use minor things and it’s like everything changed. So, so it’s like very hard to predict in advance. Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: I think also if you give a creator a really scripted piece of content, or if you give them a really narrow idea that’s very brand heavy, that isn’t what their audience wants to watch, of course, it won’t perform well. So when we do onboarding calls with every single creator for a campaign, because we’re like, what does your audience want to see? How would you recommend fitting these talking points in? Because that will make the content perform better. And again, if you are giving them a script that’s like, I love Adobe Firefly

Randy Rayess: Because it’s excellent.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Yeah. Because it is excellent. Thank you to Adobe. Like no one’s gonna watch it, so of course it won’t do well. So you are asking to be lied to. And so I just think like, have some empathy for the creator there.

Randy Rayess: That’s interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta do the harder route is is the better route in this case. All right. So last question. Any advice that you would give to, we have a lot of marketers on this podcast and they’re trying to think through influencer marketing influencer strategies. Some of them probably are, you know, DMing influencers, some of them are using platforms. What advice do you have for them?

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: I think often influencer marketers are hired and they’re one person working for a company. And they’re expected to do the strategy, the outreach or the contracting, or the approvals. And they hire really smart, qualified influencer marketing people and then have them do admin. That will minimize your ability to run exciting campaigns that will minimize your ability to sell internally, to get more budget to be strategic. So what I would do if I were an influencer marketer hired for a brand, would do a couple of strategic tests to prove that influencer marketing works or helps them hit the core KPIs. And then I would use that to internally storyteller and get an agency partner or hire junior people to do the work. And then you get to advocate as a strategic kind of educator. Internally, I think one of the biggest issues is you are asking an influencer marketing person to do admin work and you’re paying a high salary and then you’re like, why aren’t we seeing results? It’s because you’re burning out your own team. So anything you can do to make sure you are a strategic leader in terms of inside your organization will pay dividends for you in the future. Because your job primarily is gonna be education. Because, it’s very rare that CMO understands the power of influence marketing. Interesting. And you need time to educate them and you need time to work with the CFO or the finance team to prove results. So as much as you can do small strategic tests. And then work on finding a way to scale those that do not take up all your time. Because you can very quickly fall into a trap. You’re burning yourself out. Yeah. Running these campaigns. You can want like onboard max 40 creators in a month, 40 contracts a month. That’s a lot. That’s a lot. If you are doing that, you’re trapped in a cycle that you’re gonna lose and you’ll be probably the first person to go if there is a layoff. So you’ll be, and I just, I think try and put yourself in a position where you are internally educating, which makes a huge difference.

Randy Rayess: Interesting. Yeah. And then on the other, when you say doing tests, how do you recommend they kind of do the analytics, you know to make sure that the tests are actually what happened? As you mentioned you have sometimes where it’s like 10 x better than actually think it is based on what you track. So how do you recommend they do that part?

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Yeah, you should not be, you should not be doing any tests without a tool for sourcing creators. Even if you borrow a friend login. Yeah. I don’t. If you have a friend who works at, you know, who works at a bigger brand who has access to fuels, I often have people message me like, Hey, can you just send me a screenshot to check this person hasn’t bought followers? Like, make sure you either have a tool or you’re using someone’s tool to make sure you are accessing the right audiences. Because if the audience doesn’t match your target customer, it’s not gonna work. And then also you can also, if you don’t have access to those tools and your company is relying on influencer basically based, not based on posting content but based on producing content for you to run as paid ads, work really closely with your paid team to see what those results are. Because then you’re seeing if you are creative is better. It’s not about the influence audience and how they act, it’s about their assets working better in paid ads. So then use that test and make sure the paid ads team is targeting correctly and make sure to see if, if that outperforming brand paid brand assets, brand produced assets, know it, and then learn where you’re doubling down. Interesting. So yeah, don’t make sure you have a budget to use a tool. Use a tool. There are some really cheap effective ones out there. Or if you’re using ads, just make sure you are looking at the data and making a case internally. 

Randy Rayess: Cool. So a lot of great advice there. I like the point about strategy and not spending time on admin work. Because Just going forth, and going back and forth on a contract can be like a ton of admin work. And so just having, having that focus on, okay, what’s the quick strategy here and making sure that you’re spending time on that. And then and then you don’t have to do the boilerplate, same you know, copy for every single same creative for every single person. So you get to do that better as well. That’s great. Honestly, this was an amazing interview. We’ve covered a lot of things.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Covered a lot of substance. Took a lot of turns. I didn’t expect to take it.

Let’s Conclude!

Randy Rayess: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Jennifer Quigley-Jones who is the CEO & Founder, Digital Voices.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Randy Rayess: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month. for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.