Speaker A
Hey guys, welcome back to another video. Um, I haven't done one of these for a while just because I've been traveling.
Alex shares how to start an influencer marketing agency, emphasizing niching down, building relationships, and industry insights from his $5M+ agency experience.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Niching down early is crucial to differentiate your influencer agency and attract the right clients.
- Building strong relationships with both brands and creators is essential for agency success.
- The influencer marketing industry is highly competitive but poised for significant growth.
- Larger agencies have advantages in trust and cash flow that help them secure bigger clients.
- Authenticity and raw content can build a loyal audience and provide real value.
What the video covers
- Alex introduces himself as co-founder of Stride Social and Stride Talent, managing nearly 300 influencers and working with lifestyle, AI, and tech brands.
- He explains the difference between talent management and influencer marketing agencies and the importance of niching down from day one.
- Alex advises focusing on a specific brand sector or creator niche to stand out in a competitive market.
- He highlights the need to learn systems for finding brands, building relationships with creators, and developing a professional brand presence online.
- Alex discusses the growing competition in influencer marketing agencies and why larger agencies dominate due to trust and cash flow capabilities.
- He predicts significant growth in influencer marketing over the next few years, with evolving brand payment strategies based on deliverables.
- Alex shares his philosophy of creating raw, unedited content to provide authentic and valuable insights.
- He encourages viewers to support smaller creators who provide honest and in-depth knowledge.
- The video includes practical metaphors, such as comparing niche specialization to buying a car from a specialist dealer.
- Alex concludes by inviting viewers to connect on Instagram and hopes the video provides valuable mentorship.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Background
- 00:51Why Create This Video and Raw Content Philosophy
- 01:28Understanding Influencer Industry and Agency Types
- 03:25Importance of Niching Down
- 04:18Metaphor: Specialist vs Generalist
- 05:01Choosing the Right Niche
- 07:10Learning Systems and Building Relationships
- 08:01Future of Influencer Marketing and Payment Models
- 12:06Closing Remarks and Social Links
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Uh, if you guys are new, my name is Alex. I am a co-founder of a company called Stride Social, uh, and Stride Talent. It is an influencer marketing agency and also a talent management company. So, we manage influencers as
Speaker A
well. Uh, we have just under 300 influencers signed to us where we help them build businesses around their social media but also help them work with brand opportunities. Uh, we run the logistics, legality, the accounting for them, uh, under that umbrella. And then
Speaker A
Stride Social, which is our influencer marketing agency, we help lifestyle brands, um, AI brands, um, work with influencers and we sort of build the gap between, uh, both of them. Um, it's a great industry to get into at the moment
Speaker A
and I think potentially that's why you guys are watching this video because you're thinking about potentially building an influencer marketing agency or whatever it might be, right? Um, and the reason why I started creating these videos is because I would have loved
Speaker A
someone like me to explain and, you know, just just to be able to watch someone who is in the position that I potentially would want to be in, um, with, you know, free mentoring, right? Watching these videos.
Speaker A
That's what I sort of think of. And I also create really raw content. I am in the belief of not editing a video at all on my YouTube channel. So all my videos are nonedited. I don't want to edit a
Speaker A
thing. I just want to be as raw as possible. I want, you know, these videos to be gems, um, for the people out there.
Speaker A
Like when I go on YouTube and I see a video with like 3,000 views or 300 views, I'd rather click on that because I know that creator isn't holding anything back. And the same as me, I'm not going to hold anything back. If I
Speaker A
had a million subscribers, I probably have a few people telling me, "Don't say that, don't say this." Um, so that's why I think it's really great to join a community like this now and early. So that's why potentially, um, that may be
Speaker A
advice to you guys. Watch only smaller creators because they will give you the juice. They will give you everything that you need to know. Um, my first thing, of course, is you're watching this video because you are potentially
Speaker A
wanting to start your own influencer marketing agency and you want to work with influencers, right? Under influencer marketing or influencers as an industry or a sector, there's so many things under influencers that like the influencer industry that you can tap
Speaker A
into, right? You could do talent management, okay, where you manage influencers, you take a percentage from closing deals for them. Um, and then you have the influencer marketing agency where you help brands and you niche down to whatever brand you want to work with.
Speaker A
So, we've sort of niched down to AI and lifestyle brands, um, and tech brands just because that's just our, that's just what we've been doing for the last four years. Um, just saying we have generated just over seven figures, uh, a year for
Speaker A
the agency in revenue. Um, you know, so hopefully we know what we're doing. We have a team of 12 just at the moment. Um, and and yeah, um, just giving you some social proof I think is really important. So if you're thinking about
Speaker A
starting an agency, what are the things that I would look into? And the big thing if I was wanting to restart again is niche down on day one. So what I mean by that is what we did back in the day is we were like,
Speaker A
"Okay, we're going to be an influencer marketing agency and we're going to work with anyone." So, it's great. You can work with anyone, and I think that's really important. But when you're doing sort of like, um, finding clients, you
Speaker A
basically, how I see it is like you're looking at a million people and you're saying, "This is my service." And they're like, "What's your uniqueness?" You're like, "We do influencer marketing." And a lot more, a lot of people go, "Well, you're just the same
Speaker A
as everyone else." But if you niche down to, you know, a sector like lifestyle brands or AI brands or whatever, it's not a million people. It's, you know, it's 50,000 people, but those 50,000 people, they want your service because
Speaker A
you, you're very custom to them. You know what it's like working with AI brands or tech brands or whatever you niche down to, rather than going, I work with everyone, anyone, just give me money. Uh, and there's a really good example
Speaker A
probably maybe this is really bad metaphor but it's like going to a, um, buying a car. You don't go to most of the time I guess cars is a bit difficult but you won't go to a guy who
Speaker A
sells every car because he doesn't specialize in the car you want to buy. Let's say I want to buy a BMW.
Speaker A
I'm going to go to a specialist BMW dealer, a special, I don't know, I think it's called like approved, uh, seller of BMW, right? I'd rather go to him than some hillbilly or whatever who
Speaker A
are selling like Fords, Mercedes, BMWs, everything because I know that guy who's going to sell that BMW or who just sells BMWs, he knows what he's going to be talking about. I know everyone who goes there is looking
Speaker A
for a BMW. Um, and the price is probably quite reasonable, right? So, that's what I mean. Okay, hopefully that doesn't confuse anything too much. So, I would niche down to the type of brands I would want to work with. And that's the same
Speaker A
with if you're wanting to build a talent agency, you only sign a specific type of creator. Okay? Is it couple creators? Is it lifestyle creators? Is it tech, AI creators? Is it, you know, sport creators? Maybe there's a specific sport
Speaker A
that you want to tap into. Maybe rugby, cricket, whatever. Um, so it's like really trying to niche down, okay? And you want to not niche down too far down in the sense of there's no one, there's not much opportunity in that, in that
Speaker A
industry. For example, I don't know, you want to niche down to working with football cards, football card games or something like that. And there's not that many creators who do content on that or Pokémon cards. Let's just make
Speaker A
that you're a Pokemon agency and you only work with Pokemon influencers and creators and Pokemon brands and you're like it's a bit too niche. So that's one thing. Okay. So let's not niche down. Uh, or sorry, you want to niche down to an
Speaker A
extent, right? What's the other one? Um, I would probably want to learn systems. I would want to probably learn how to find brands. I would probably want to learn how to build relationships with creators.
Speaker A
Uh, I would love to learn how to build a professional personal brand or business brand on LinkedIn, website, all these sort of things. So very much is as well. Then the next question is, is influencer marketing the new sort of like social media agency and
Speaker A
I really believe that there has been, you know, we started Stride Social, Stride Group probably, oh, it's not probably, it's just four years, just over four years ago and there's probably been, I want to say, probably an extra 50 agencies pop up in
Speaker A
the UK, UK and the UK, US or wherever they are and they all offer the same thing.
Speaker A
So it's just like there's a lot of competition. There is definitely a lot of competition and that's why the bigger agencies are winning because the brands are receiving so many new agency opportunities whereas like the big agencies are the ones only winning
Speaker A
because they can provide the results. They can provide, you know, they can go on a cash flow, um, uh, pause cash flow in the sense of getting paid in 30 days and 90 days or having trust to have half a
Speaker A
million pounds in budget sent to the brand or sent to the agency knowing that the, the agency is not going to go bankrupt and run away with it sort of thing. Um, so I, I really think agencies are going to be or influencer marketing
Speaker A
agencies are going to go through the roof. I think in the next year, two years. I really think influencer marketing as such or working with influencers is going to the roof. Of course, there's so much chat.
Speaker A
thing. I slightly agree with that. I also think let's not be a bit too crazy.
Speaker A
If people will know when it is AI and people will slowly get detached with that because it's not a real person. The people why people follow people who are influencers are because they're interesting or they create good content or um people admire
Speaker A
them. No one admires an AI a um AI like influencer. Like no one looks up and goes, "Oh, that's so great." because it's someone behind the AI making them do this type of thing. So yeah, I don't think influencer marketing is going to
Speaker A
go anywhere. Um I I I really think there's different strategies that is coming in place more going towards like back in the day brands would pay just a lot of money to work with the creator and most of the
Speaker A
time some brands if they didn't do it correct which a lot of our campaigns they saw returns and they were returning clients but sometimes of course you have that where they spend $50,000 and their return is like 10%. So they don't make
Speaker A
their money back. They think influence marketing whatever. But with the new strategies that are coming out, it's all about, okay, how are we going to get this return? How are we going to get as much value or as many assets back from
Speaker A
the budget? So, it's not about the influencer activation. It's actually about, you know, getting the content for paid advertising, uh, you know, getting the uses, getting exclusivity. You know, maybe we can use the the influencers's image in a website or an ad. You know,
Speaker A
there's so many things now the brand is now just not just focusing on an activation. It's actually the payment is towards lots of deliverables. Um because brands are now going, look, if we're going to spend money, we need something
Speaker A
back in return which is actually like not physical. Um but something that they can actually use, right? Um I'm just trying to think at the moment a lot a lot is happening as well within the industry brands. There are some agencies
Speaker A
going bankrupt which is pretty mad. not paying on time. I'm pretty sure we've got one agency not paying on time or they haven't paid and we've lost money.
Speaker A
Um, you know, it's so where you work with an agency. So, what happens is there's a brand, there's an agency and an agency. The brand is working with this agency and then we're here, right?
Speaker A
So, there's three three parties. brand pays um this brand uh the brand pays agency and then agency pays us. So what's happening is the workload is brand is saying I want to work with this influencer. This agency goes okay I'll
Speaker A
reach out to that agency to work with that creator of course I talent agency and then they reach out to us we confirm rate whatever they then this agency goes yeah we'll probably add on $500 or whatever percentage on top of what we've
Speaker A
provided and the brand will accept. So what's happened is we run the campaign brand sends product to influencer brief gets created by the brand or the the agency in the middle agency provides us the brief and then we get our creator to
Speaker A
create the video and our campaign team comes in helps the creator film whatever and then when it comes to posting they'll post and then we send invoice we send invoice to agency not brand when we send invoice to agency agency doesn't
Speaker A
pay us because brand doesn't pay them so they don't get paid paid because the brand doesn't pay so we don't get paid.
Speaker A
So then there's actually a fourth person who's the creator. So creator doesn't get paid. We don't get paid for our work. That agency doesn't get paid and then the brand just gets a free promotion. So or what has happened is
Speaker A
that agency so we here agency brand this agency goes bankrupt makes all their payments within their company pays their employees and then us. So then we have to pay our crater and then we lose and that's just how the game works. Um
Speaker A
which is so annoying. Of course we have insurance and stuff but it's just like what do you do in that situation? But anyway, I wanted to just blur out loads of I don't want to say anymore to be honest. I just wanted to make this
Speaker A
video and say hi. Um hope everyone is well um and enjoying life to be honest.
Speaker A
I I think the world is in a really interesting place. Um, I hate when people say that, but I think it is. It feels like something is coming. Um, and it's something to potentially be aware of when you're building a business,
Speaker A
seeing if it is going to be, you know, okay, if there is a situation in the world. Um, so yeah, have a good one. If you are new, please subscribe. I post videos, very raw videos about business, but mainly influencer marketing agencies
Speaker A
and talent agencies. If you are there watching this and you want to build a talent agency or an influencer marketing agency, send me a message on Instagram.
Speaker A
My Instagram is the same or will be down in the below down in the description.
Speaker A
Um, but send me a message. I can try and give you some support. I do have some mentoring slots open. I've been teaching some people, you know, from A to Zed of how to build a business, how to build an
Speaker A
influencer marketing agency to then opening, going live, working with creators, signing influencers to a talent management company. Um, or maybe you want to be a talented agent, maybe you want to work with influencers and earn your own commissions and everything
Speaker A
like that. We have a whole structure in place. So, whatever you want to do, send me a message. Maybe you want some help.
Speaker A
Um, and uh, I'll see you in a bit. But, thank you for thank you very much for watching and uh, hopefully I didn't just blur out too much rubbish. Um, and hopefully you provided or you had some value from me. So, uh, cheers guys.
Speaker A
Bye-bye.
Topics:influencer marketinginfluencer agencytalent managementniche marketingbrand partnershipssocial media agencyinfluencer businessagency growthcontent creationdigital marketing
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