Maximizing ROI with a Sales and Marketing Consultant

 Personally, I’ve always valued advice from those that practice what they preach. In that regard, it’s noteworthy that everything you read and all the tactics to go along are based on firsthand experience. My company, Relatable, has done over influencer marketing collaborations (reaching well over half a billion people), across 40 different countries, in every 

vertical3 that you can imagine. Some of these insights are things that other agencies and industry experts probably would want to keep away from you. Proprietary tools of the trade, so to speak. It's not standard operating procedure to document everything you know only to give it away. Especially not if you believe that part of your own business offering is built on having 

access to that knowledge. I've even been accused of giving too much away, insinuating that it could lead to less business, instead of more. Obviously, I believe the very opposite to be true. Adding to this, there are lots of talks these days about the importance of transparency. Unfortunately, it’s not practiced as frequently as it’s preached. Instead, it’s more common for 

Brands to suffer from overpromise

and industry jargon from partners that aren’t educating them enough. In times like these, the right thing to do is to share what you know that can hopefully be of value to others, with the intent of helping as many people as possible. And that’s why you’ll get nothing but full, radical transparency from here moving forward. These days, you win by sharing what you know with 

the world not by keeping secrets. It’ll accelerate the growth of our industry and help both creators and brandsThe first iteration of Influencer Marketing for Brands (since then rewritten from scratch) was self-published and for sale on my company’s website without any middlemen. I had full control over distribution, and it gave me unrestricted access to speak 

with every single book buyer, since I had their contact details. This wasn’t a strategic decision per se, but rather the consequence of not having a publishing deal in the first place. Strategic or not, it gave me an unparalleled opportunity to run my own research and speak with the many marketing teams that claimed a copy of the book, to understand exactly what kind of 

Questions they had and the problems

they were looking to solve. Over time, no less than 5,000 marketing professionals actually helped shape the content of this book. Without their help, there’d be no way to know that 40% of readers struggle to identify creators and influencers that are aligned with their brand, that there’s a greater chance than not (55%) that your manager is giving you a hard time about 

evaluating how effective your influencer marketing campaigns are, that it is very likely (76%, but who’s counting!) that you’re operating your influencer marketing campaigns manually, without any tools. I know that influencer marketing fraud, brand safety, and a disconnect between marketing objectives and key results all cause great concerns within your 

organization. See, you’re not alone! In addition to this, the research expands way beyond my own world and the experience within the company4 that I co-founded in 2015 to insights and research that have been published by other agencies, influencer marketing platforms, industry thought-leaders, and firsthand data from the social media platforms themselves.To a man 

With a hammer everything looks

like a nail Finally, before we move forward, there’s something I’d like to address. As a marketer, you have a toolbox. One of the tools at your disposal is influencer marketing, but it’s risky to pick out the tool (the channel) before you know what you’re building (your marketing objective). This is a common mistake among marketing professionals. They’ll decide that 

goal is to run aninfluencer marketing program before they identify what their actual marketing objective is. As much as I’ll advocate that you turn influencer marketing into your most valuable marketing channel, there are, unfortunately, no one-size-fits-all solutions. It’s easy to get carried away and reason by analogy or the proxy of others, but don’t make the mistake of 

picking out the tool before you know what you’re building. As such, a large part of this book is structured to help you understand why, how, and when the various ways you can apply influencer marketing to your media mix are applicable and relevant for you and when they are not. Perhaps you’ve read statements like “There’s an 11× ROI on influencer marketing,”

Conclusion

delivers better results than any other media channel.” Those statements and promises are absolutely true. Someone, or even a large number of brands, absolutely got those results. But are they relevant or applicable to you? They certainly could be, but we shouldn't immediately assume that they are until you’ve assessed the situation. In fact, no strategy with substantial upside is entirely risk-free. You’ll likely fail a few times before you win big, even if you’re best 

in class. That’s just a part of the gameIf you are a designer, videographer, photographer, writer, artist, model, or the like, selling work or services by the hour, or project, rather than working for a single employer on a regular salary, you’re a freelancer. If you create content for brands, on YouTube or Instagram, you’re also participating in the rapidly growing global freelance economy. It’s predicted that freelancers are expected to be the majority of the US 

workforce by 2027, based on current growth rates trajectory. In the very near future, the job title freelancer will be more popular than any other job, combined. But not only that. The study from Upwork also observed that almost half of working millennials (47%) are already freelance, a participation rate higher than any other generation.The bottom line: Your seemingly strange gig as a multitasking freelancing social media creator will soon be more