Leveraging Social Media Influencers for Your E-Commerce Business

Social media influencers can help you grow your e-commerce business, and our latest podcast guest Brett Bernstein has built software that scales brand influencer and ambassador programs for e-commerce brands.

Brett is the founder and CEO of Gatsby.ai. He shares how he responded to e-commerce companies' needs by building Gatsby and advice on how entrepreneurs can build a business for the long haul.

From Digital Vending Machines to Social Media Influencers

Ramin: How did Gatsby come about? What were you doing, and how did that idea start?

Brett: So the company I started five or six years ago, still called Gatsby, was so different from what we are today. I didn't sit down one day and dream up this idea of scaling influencer marketing in a silo.

It wasn't my idea over coffee or a drink. Instead, it was a constant iteration that got us here through customer feedback and requests. I think that's the most important way to grow a business: by having companies use it and give you feedback, and those requests drive it.

The story goes that when I wanted to start my next business, I wanted to find something unique to my background, which had been healthy vending machines and enterprise software. And I came across a concept at the time, 2015ish, called social media vending machines.

Finding the Right Size Micro-Influencer

Ramin: Can you define the micro-influencer level? Is it less than 5,000?

Brett: There isn't a standard in the market. We have clients who want to implement our strategy for people with anything north of 500 followers. But then other brands think "micro" has less than a hundred thousand. There's such a deviation in what brands are defining, and really what it comes down to is how many customers you have at your disposal to work with?

If you're a smaller merchant doing under a million dollars in revenue, you're going to want to start at a smaller level because that's what you have access to. You have many more people with 500 followers or more, and that army of influence can be built. And then, as you grow your business and you have more and more customers, you can start to see more volume of people who have more than a thousand followers and 5,000 followers.

But what we make available to e-commerce businesses is the ability to scale that micro-influencer channel. So whatever you define that channel as, whether it be 500 followers or starting at 3000 followers, it's all based on your unique volume and your unique need as a brand.

How Gatsby Helps E-Commerce Grow Via Social Media Influencers

Ramin: What happens behind the scenes once Gatsby gets installed? What's the process?

Brett: So the same way you ask for an email or a phone number from your customers to do SMS marketing or email marketing, you would start to ask for an Instagram handle or a TikTok handle.

And then that information goes into your Gatsby account. Gatsby enriches that: it pulls in all the publicly-available insights on that person's handle. So you're going to see their profile photo, how many followers they have, their bio, and all the keywords in their bio. And then we give this data to you in Gatsby, and you can start to segment it.

You put your customers into buckets based on influence. So all of your customers who have between 500 and a thousand followers, that's a segment. A thousand followers to 10,000 followers, that's a segment. And you can start to see how your customers are distributed along this influence spectrum.

Advice for E-commerce Entrepreneurs

Ramin: What one tip would you give e-commerce entrepreneurs to take their business to the next level, to get them excited?

Brett: It's not as fast as you think. I've been doing this for over five years, and a lot of people have come and gone in that time.

People that raised a lot of money fast, and at the time, I was thinking, well, I'm going to go the slow road. I saw people raise two, $3 million in their first year. But they're out of business, and I just keep going along. It's like the tortoise and the hare.

I just keep my head down, and I focus on what matters the most. And I'm growing at a great clip right now. Our business is growing, but it wasn't overnight. And people that only hear about us now think that we're brand new, and it's all overnight growth.