I think the approach he took was too naive. I went to a meetup about "YouTube influencers" a few months ago who explained just this; there are companies whose sole purpose is to "vet" YouTubers and find you the right influencer for your product. They do all the heavy lifting for you, there's one pretty big one here locally called RoosterTeeth (yep they do influencer marketing nowadays amongst other stuff, if you watch h3h3 on YT they worked with him number of times).
The article was interesting nonethelss: the writer was transparent and laying down his assumptions and how they carried out the work AND the process. Executing a thing like this might be trivial but it requires a lot of annoying work, I know this by experience: even for simply sending a t-shirt to a customer (which is a simpler item is a pain).
Nowadays luckily you can send t-shirts or other apparel with a single click directly from the company that produces the item (there are a couple of names out there who will do that).
BUT if you've got custom items or boxes of items (like in this scenario) you have to think about packaging, costs and the "unboxing experience", that last one is critical.
Unboxing experience can make or break the whole video.
I feel bad for the author who did so much work (180 attempts!?!) to get 17 videos and 0 sales and I suggest next time he goes to these specialists if he's really committed in using YT as a marketing chanenl.
> sole purpose is to "vet" YouTubers and find you the right influencer for your product
Any idea what are some of the criteria they use to find the perfect youtuber? I'd be surprised if this could be done reliably for many products, let alone for it to be worth it over common-sense random sampling when including the additional cost of their services.
I asked that exact question at the meetup: They said it's a secret formula based on a lot of "data analsis".
Basically to me this smells like a lot of manual work by a team of humans, reading through countless of YT comments and reddit posts to understand exactly how a target audience reacts and "thinks" to various subjects.
But I could be wrong because they didn't say anything too specific but just "data analysis" which could be anything?!
The example with h3h3 they described as a successful campaign, was a vibrating toothbrush - electric and all that jazz, after being featured in the video "en passant", they drove so much traffic to the sponsor's webpage that their ecommerce timedout/crashed.
It seems a bit like FUD to me. Crashing a eCommerce page often speaks more to the poor quality of the site then to the volume of traffic generated. Maybe I'm too cynical, but where's the real proof that they are consistently worth the value?
You can sign up for one of the multiple marketplaces for influencers and see all the metrics. I've seen simple things like number of followers, videos, views, comments, length of video, etc. The category their YouTube channel is in. Related stats on their other social media like Facebook and IG, etc.
The one I used, you put up an ad of your product, and influencers applied, so you could quickly vet them by easily going through the data in one place.
I was gonna say the same thing. There’s lot of firms that do this exact thing for you. They handle setting up the agreements with the channels and supplying the products and making sure they’re not just trashing on you.
What I’d do instead of unboxing videos is to have the channels call you out as a sponsor with a coupon in a number of their videos. And hopefully you can hit “meme level” like freshbooks, tunnel bear, etc.
The other thing is cosplayers seems like a weird target audience. I’d be focusing on gamers, they seem to like that blind surprise box stuff.
They aren't celebrities. They aren't just people with a following or a popular channel. They are specifically people with a following that are successful at converting sales.
Unless you have something interesting to say on the matter, I don't think this forum needs more "le wrong generation"[0] posts.
Artists, creators, chefs, bloggers, travel junkies, etc. Whatever it is that they actually do.
You do not just become an "influencer", instead you gain influence by way of gaining a following for doing (and being good at) something. The term is definitely overloaded and mostly pointless now.
The article was interesting nonethelss: the writer was transparent and laying down his assumptions and how they carried out the work AND the process. Executing a thing like this might be trivial but it requires a lot of annoying work, I know this by experience: even for simply sending a t-shirt to a customer (which is a simpler item is a pain).
Nowadays luckily you can send t-shirts or other apparel with a single click directly from the company that produces the item (there are a couple of names out there who will do that). BUT if you've got custom items or boxes of items (like in this scenario) you have to think about packaging, costs and the "unboxing experience", that last one is critical.
Unboxing experience can make or break the whole video.
I feel bad for the author who did so much work (180 attempts!?!) to get 17 videos and 0 sales and I suggest next time he goes to these specialists if he's really committed in using YT as a marketing chanenl.