Dive into William Gasner's entrepreneurial journey from farmer's market beginnings to e-commerce success and launching Stack Influence — a platform connecting brands with micro-influencers. Discover the tactics and lessons learned from scaling businesses to seven figures, the transition between product and service industries, and the art of nurturing a robust influencer marketplace.
Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market Podcast.
- From jewelry to seven-figure sales.
- E-comm logistics vs. service scalability.
- Influencer marketing adds brand margin.
- Pivoting back to service with Stack Influence.
- SEO and direct outreach as growth levers.
Resources:
Connect with William Gasner:
Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks:
Quotables:
- 15:05 - William: So it's enabled me to not only learn new tactics about e-commerce and best ways to use it, but also to create a business that can have a potential to not only help hundreds of thousands of e-commerce brands, ideally millions, but our goal is to actually have a billion social media users on the platform to be promoting every day.
Brian: That's awesome. So, and you get to stay in the e-commerce space by proxy at that point, which is nice. - 10:24 - So the cool thing about influencer marketing is you get this kind of, it's a unique marketing tactic in the world of all of these different ways to get your product out there in the sense that it gives you more bang for your buck and more value across different sectors. So take just online advertising in general, like running an ad on Facebook, right? Your, only really return there is a sale, which at the end of the day is valuable. And that's what we all want. Is like get your product out there and people buy it money and money out. However, that is the same thing with influencer marketing, right? People are gonna be promoting your product and that you're gonna pay them X amount of money and then that's going to result ideally in eCommerce sales. However, on top of that, you're not just getting a sale, they're getting a piece of content.
- 11:21 - All of those things actually build your brand. And that can be sometimes hard to equate exact value to it, but I personally think it's kind of an invaluable thing. It's like what is the value of having a website in general, right? It's like, a good brand or a good logo. It's like this creates this image of who you are, who's using your product and that can really take you to the next level.
- 24:59 - Like people have a bad taste in their mouth from some people perceive influencers as almost sellouts where we perceive them as again, a passion promoter, someone promoting something that they care about because they're willing to put in a bunch of effort for a product themself because it fits with what they love, what they want to share. And there's nothing better and more authentic and more trustworthy than that type of advocacy. It's again, word-of-mouth marketing. It's like who do you trust most in your life when you're going to buy something? It's someone who's a kind of an expert in that industry, right?
- 22:47 - In the same way as also certain levels to content quality and curation. So what has blown up in the space, which is besides the promotion itself, is what people call UGC “user-generated content” specifically in the world of advertising. So creating a video post that's a full testimonial, right? There are levels to helping the creator actually make that post more valuable. Editing it, adding captions, adding animations. And those things where there can be profit sharing involved using our technology and monetizing and even charging. There's other platforms, and this is something we have discussed
Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks: