What is up DTC pod? Today we are joined by Josh Durham, who is the founder of Align Growth, which is an agency that helps DTC brands scale through influencer partnerships and performance UGC. So Josh, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved in the space and what led you into starting align growth?

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Super stoked to be here. Thanks again for the invite. Yeah, I basically was an in house marketer for most of my career. I started in DSc in 2015 with a weighted blanket company. I scaled that out of my parents garage and scaled it up to 6 million a year. 60 employees.

And then that tanked overnight. I went bankrupt and then I hopped into in house role as head of growth at a company called Groove Life. And yeah, there I basically managed seven figures a month in ad spend. And so I've just always been a performance marketing guy. And I launched aligned growth in January of 2021 just doing performance marketing, paid social email marketing, but really was getting bored of it. And then all of a sudden I became my greatest fear, which is a brand marketer. And someone DM me like, hey, do you ever offer influencer marketing? And I was kind of like, I've done influencer before as part of the marketing mix at these in house brand, but never kind of just focus on it. But I took it on and I just really enjoyed it and it was just way more fun, just like way more creative.

And we just had all these crazy results for clients. And so ever since then, influencer marketing, creator businesses, like all that fun stuff, I just feel like is way more of a fun playbox, sorry, sandbox to play in than performance marketing. And it know adds to the rest of the business. So yeah, I've been doing it ever since. Sweet.

And one thing I'd love for you to break down, Josh, maybe for the audience is maybe the difference between all those different things. Like you mentioned, you've got performance, you've got creator, you've got influencer. And they're all related, but they're slightly different. So how do you think about all those different motions for a company and just characterize them for us, if you would?

Yeah, for sure. So I would say that's a great question because there's so many buzzwords around influencer. There's influencer, there's creator, there's affiliate, there's ambassador, there's like all these different buzwords that we can kind of chop it up. And so I like to use the word influencer. I feel like it's the most all encompassing of what we do at someone on organic social who has a sizable following primarily on Instagram and every, I would say every influencer is a creator. Not every creator is an influencer. So I think just in the last few years with UGC, we've seen all these micro creators who are making UGC content just for the sake of paid. So, but we really specialize in influencer versus UGC content creation.

So we are working with creators who have a following that are posting it organically on their page. And then brands can then leverage that however they see fit on their own organic social, on site, on paid social. And they're also getting the benefit of a top of funnel brand awareness play that ultimately is just beating the rest of the funnel.

Yeah. Because any of these creators can be used for three different verticals within a company, which is for sourcing creative, for bringing awareness of the brand, or for bringing sales and revenue growth. And so it seems like you really lean into the performance side of things. And I think most brands probably do awareness and don't do it as performance. But that's also because of a lack of understanding of how do you measure and use influencer as a channel of performance. I'm curious, which of those are you guys focus on? And it's like your bread and butter.

Yeah, for sure. So how we measure influencer is we really measure it as an attention channel. And so I think that people are measuring, try to measure influencer like it's 2015, where you just sponsor an influencer, you pay them $1,000 and then you see 5000 come back as a direct response. It's like they're trading influencers like paid social, where influencers should be treated much more like TV. And so where influencer is really there to drive. Top of funnel awareness, top of funnel traffic at cheap CPM. So we have clients that we will drive 100 million organic impressions a year at $8 cpms for the year. Just because, number one, we're sending out tons of free product.

We're also sponsoring creators posts and negotiating rates on a CPM basis. And then we see that performance translating eventually into sales through post purchase surveys and seeing seven figures plus of post purchase surveys coming in. But I think that as myself, as a performance guy moving into brand, you know that I want every single influencer to be driving sales via discount code or an affiliate link. But I often think that there's so much going on, especially if you're an eight figure, nine figure brand, there's so many marketing activities that those links are getting lost. The discount code is getting scooped up by retailmenot and it's off to the races from there. So those are kind of like the KPIs that we use to measure and how our most successful clients think about influencer as a channel.

That's super interesting about the post purchase survey as like attribution, because a lot of companies will do it even before or while you're doing the purchase, how did you hear about us, et cetera? But you're just adding more friction into the funnel. They might just select one of the multiple choice just to get it over with. So how does that work? How does that work for post purchase? Like what are they getting? And why would they share that info with you?

Yeah, for sure. It's actually pretty interesting, I think. Number one, a lot of our clients use no kno, like post purchase surveys, and they're selecting that as an actual channel in post purchase. And then they're referring to a specific influencer. But one of the things I was actually just talking to a brand like three weeks ago, he basically attributes the exact number is 42% of his revenue to influencers right now. But his affiliate links only attribute 20% of his total revenue to influencer. And there's this major drop off because of what I just mentioned. You see an influencers post on Instagram or TikTok, then you go to Google and then you type it in, you click on the brand search, Google gets the purchase.

They didn't track it with a link or a code or a view through a conversion. Nothing got tracked. And so he's lucky in the fact that he's a medical device sales and medical device sales. And basically it's a pre purchase survey, kind of like what you were mentioning is that when they're signing up for this prescription, they answer, where did you hear about us? And it's influencer. And it's like, which influencer? And that's how they're actually tracking back affiliate revenues per influencer. I don't know.

And do you manually reward those?

Yes, he manually rewards them month and reconciles sales versus what the affiliate links, which is good because then he could double down on those efforts because he knows that they're working. But I think that's like a missing piece. It's almost like this middle of funnel where people are dropping off on landing pages and going into email flows and then converting versus click a link to purchase.

Yeah. And I love the manually, the rewarding because at the end of the day, you want to incentivize the influencer as much as possible, then they might want to voluntarily just shout you out and continue working with you. Before we get into further on expanding relationships with influencers, I'm curious, you mentioned CPMs, and so that's sort of like the golden rule for you to decide which creators to activate. But I'm curious, how do you define the quality of those impressions? How do you sort of vet for the quality of those impressions? Because a creator might have really low CPMs. Then you look at them on the TikTok creator marketplace, and more than half their audience is in Philippines, et cetera. So I wonder what your vetting process for those impressions is.

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, ultimately we are looking at the consistency of those views. So over the last, when we're negotiating a deal with a creator, we're looking at the last ten videos. We're not just going off. Like, if you look at TikTok, you'll see one video that has like 10 million plays or 100 million plays and they have all these likes, but all the rest of their videos have 1000 plays. And so there is some nuance, but we're doing it at such a high level, at such a high volume of creator partnerships that oftentimes in terms of where their following is coming from, we're not always going to every single creator and double checking where their audience, as long as they are in the specific country that our brands are in, that's how we look at it. But it's really about the consistency of volume because I don't think that there's any true metric to use other than CPM and looking at the total views of that content over time to actually come up with an agreeable number. Otherwise, a lot of brands have just been burned.

Like in the last few years of I paid $5,000 for an Instagram reel and nothing happened. I paid $2,000 for a story and they had a million followers, but nothing happened. And so I think at the end of the day, we have to think of ourselves as performance marketers. We're not magicians, we're marketers. And so we need a testing budget and we need to see what the results are over time. So starting with the global budget as $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month to start sponsoring creator content and seeing what the results were over time, kind of looking at the comments, seeing who are the type of people that are commenting, making sure those aren't people, just bots or people in the Philippines, but getting a better understanding of who they are.

You mentioned that you look at the last ten and then say one might have popped with 10 million views. I'm curious what your thoughts are on. Well, if we look at the last 20, every one out of four hit a million plus views, whatever initial performance was. Okay, let's just pay for four for this creator. Or do you just sort of say, like, do one off engagements with each creator? Does the math make sense there?

Yeah, that's a good question. Sorry, I'm going to pause for 1 second. I'm going to close my door because my dog jumped in here a second ago.

Oh, good. No worries.

Sorry about that. I have a Doberman and it was like, I thought the door was closed and he just came in here and I was like, I thought he was about to bark out the window. I was like, oh, definitely.

Good.

So annoying. All right, so your question was about deliverables. Like, quantity of deliverables. So I think that number one, how we like to approach most creator relationships is always through free product first. And so our clients, typically 80% of each brand's partnerships is through product gifting. It's such an efficient method to generate awareness. The cogs are going to be so cheap compared to the influencer typical rate that we're able to get tons of content and awareness for a deep discount. So number two is in terms of approaching those larger partnerships.

Yes. We, number one, can bake that into a retainer. So we might do like a three month contract with a creator. So instead of a one off post, there's like a three to four month engagement where they're posting several times a month. And it's that whole kind of methodology of someone needs to see content six to seven times on average before they purchase. Like that kind of whole methodology, it's actually true. I feel like people just say that and you're kind of like, okay, this guy is so fake. But I actually just had a client who they started out with a really well known famous surfer last year.

And honestly, in the first two or three months, they were only driving like $800 a month, maybe for an eight figure brand, which is just nothing. And then over time, as they continued to use the product and kept showing up consistently, they're starting to drive 60, $70,000 worth of sales every single month. So I think that it makes a lot of sense to start on free product first, but then having a retainer style engagement is always available. But each deal is different. And I think that there's different things that you can pull, like creative rights and usage rights over a certain period of time of six months or a year. That kind of help you get the contract to a cheaper rate.

Yeah, to make that work, you need volume, right? Like, you need volume in terms of responses of creators. And so there's so much heavy lifting to get a machine like that going, especially when it comes to sourcing, right? Like most people, if sourcing is up to them, they think of their competitors, they go, look which influencers are promoting their competitors and they run out of sources or where to source from immediately. And then they go and pay a ton of money for an influencer database. But not everyone in the database is going to want to work with them for free products. So how does your agency ensure that there's going to be enough volume for the brand?

Oh, man, that's a great question. I think number one is who the brand is, right? What we found is, number one, there are plenty of female creators who are in a women's apparel niche. There's, like, infinite volume for that. There's so many influencers out there that we can just keep working with them. But if you're in the men's apparel space, that volume is going to be way less. There's just not as many. We've worked in that space before, and it's so challenging to get the right volume just because if you think about influencers as Tam, there's just not as many. There just aren't.

And so I think you have to reset expectations per brand. We've actually worked in the outdoors space in kind of like, survival prepper type niches as well, and that was just another niche that's very few and far between. There's probably only maybe 300 total, really quality influencers in that space. And so how we think about that is instead of mass seeding out product, then I would take a small budget and go work with the biggest players in that space. That's how I would approach that. And so you just have to think about that. What's the total tam of your current market and those influencers? And then instead of sending out product, how can you introduce payment terms that make sense for them? Because at the end of the day, most influencers want consistent income over a one off hit of a post, and that way they can maintain integrity. They're working with the same brand over time.

Then they start building affinity with their audience because they've been prolonging the same one over a year versus shilling out know products and random brands every other month. And so, yeah, to answer your, like, every brand is different. And so I would kind of go more small ball and using a small budget to go with more intimate relationships.

Josh, if you're at the level, maybe you're a little bit know, approaching an agency to handle this whole play and imagine you're running your own brand and you want to tap into influencer. What would your strategy be if you were launching your own brand and you were like, I've got a little bit of budget, maybe I don't quite have the five or ten grand a month. How many creators are you working with? How much product are you seeding? I know some of it, like you said, depends on the market that you're in. But how would you structure it yourself if you were a brand?

Yeah, for sure. So how I like to think about it is, well, number one, if you're not at seven figures yet, I would just invest into paid social and email marketing and search and shopping before I even touch influencer. That's how I think of building a brand first, because a lot of times these influencer posts, it's going to be a one off hit where it's not going to be super consistent unless you're whitelisting through their page. So if you're not at seven figures yet, just stay focused on paid social and email and get to one to three mil. And so at that, I would say like 1 million a year to 5 million a year. If we're talking about kind of buckets for this, is I would really focus on just product gifting. I would just work on, number one, I would have a social media manager who is managing your TikTok, managing your Instagram, and managing your influencer partnerships. And so what I would have them do is I would get an out of the box tool.

There's a lot of great tools we use aspire and we also use a great tool called story Clash. And so I would use an out of the box tool like that and I would have them basically hit a KPI of 100 to 200 influencers sourced per week. And I would really just work on how can I efficiently generate as much content and awareness as possible just for free product weekly. And I would really focus on the lead measure of for how many influencers I reach out to, how many are opting into the campaign and want to work with us because you really need to. Maybe it's a landing page, maybe it's the type of creators that you're reaching out to, but you need to really find product market fit when it comes to influencers and just focus on getting products shipped. Like, I would just focus on getting ten shipments per week. So 40 a month going out and then you're probably going to get 30 posts a week. That's like one a day.

Sorry, 30 a month and that's like one a day. And then you're then going to be able to take all that content, put it onto your own organic social, and then also use that for paid social, use it for on site conversions, for optimizing the landing page. And so that's just how I would be going, is instead of taking three k to pay creators, I would take three k of cost of goods sold and just focus on efficiently generating new content awareness out of the market.

Yeah. Because if you're in the early stages and you're a solo founder, it's just way too much work. So it makes total sense. Why do the paid channels, like somebody might listen and think, get motivated one day, start reaching out to some influencers and start getting responses. But just the process of constantly sourcing, constantly reaching out. You need the volume so you have the leverage and the negotiation and the patience to understand. You don't have to say yes to everything, you probably have to say no to most responses you get with rates and all that. Whereas if you don't have the.

What's that?

I said it's going to be a grind, just like. And understand that you're going to get so much back and forth that you're going to be demotivated. So you might as well delegate this to someone on your team to figure it out.

Yeah. So your entire premise basically is, let's say get 5000 top of funnel like influencers to reach out to 30% or so are going to reply and then 20% or so are going to be down to do it for gifting and then you just do that over and over at mass scale, right?

Yeah. So I would say start with 100 to 200 creators a week sourced and then your opt in rates should vary between ten to 40% depending on the type of creator, what kind of product you have. And then I would just focus on optimizing that opt in rate so that tons of product is going out and you're getting those posts back and then following up. Right. They're going to get. Another great thing that we've done is we'll follow up via SMS, we'll follow up via email. And I think, yeah, to your point, Ramon, it's just about delegating this to someone who is just a part of their don't. If you're a solo founder, you don't want to be relying on motivation.

This is just something that just needs to happen automatically each week. And so we're helping build that system and we've done this for brands. We'll coach their teams in house and we'll just train them and plug the system in so that they can just get what they need. Most brands, they don't have enough content to test and paid social and across organic and so all of a sudden they're getting 40 new pieces of content that they didn't have before and just makes their media buyers happy. Makes your organic social teams happy, and then they're off to the races.

We are really excited to announce that DTCPoD is officially part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals, and we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests, and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers, and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot podcast network at PodcastNetwork.

What is your take on the platforms? Because I feel like it's kind of a booster and a helper, but most people think, okay, I want to do influencers, let's get on a platform. And not to say that the platforms don't work at all, but I just think there's so much to this process in terms of operationally. So I'm curious. You mentioned some platforms. So it's interesting to me that not only do you do it in house, but you also leverage the platform. So what's your overall take on existing platforms?

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. I think that it's so helpful to have a great tech stack. I'm kind of biased. I promise I don't have any affiliate links to send you guys. I promise.

No, we want to hear them.

Yeah, I've been through so many, I usually pay like $50,000 a year just in software costs. And so I've tested everything. And in my book, our favorite tools, our top two tools right now are aspire and story clash. And I want to talk about. So I'll talk about the first one. I'll talk about story clash first because it's the best sourcing tool that we found. And the reason that it's the best sourcing tool that we've ever found is because they don't have a good relationship with meta. And so any influencer software tool.

That's so true. We have an amazing relationship with meta. We have an amazing relationship with TikTok. The tool is usually way worse because.

They depend on their API, and that's the problem. It's like their benefit and their curse.

Yes. And so instead of the API, they're typically scraping the data, and the data is way better. Know Meta, TikTok. They're all going towards this first party creator data to know where their following is from, how fast their following story clash. They're based in Austria and they're part of the EU data privacy kind of stuff. So number one, their data is super clean, but they don't have the relationship with meta, which makes their sourcing tool way better. So I can go in, I can look at, I can actually search brands in there and I can see every influencer that they've worked with in the past year and I can export that as a list. So that's just like such a great advantage when a new brand is onboarding and I can go look at who their competitors are working with and then maybe even just look at their current existing influencers and make a look like off of that audience.

But I'll say that that is the best sourcing tool where aspire has been the best and in my book, like the most affordable management tool. So number one, building out campaigns decentralized, where influencers are coming in to apply. So we always set up an evergreen campaign of just, this is a central application for influencers or affiliates to apply, but then creating larger moments throughout the quarter where we're building out campaigns around new product drops, promotions, maybe they're doing something at retail that we're going to have 30 to 40 influencers actually go in store or paying them to go make content about their experience going into target or Walmart. And so aspire just has a ton of awesome capabilities there that make it super easy to make new campaigns to ship product through your Shopify store. Or are, I guess in terms of like, do you need to use a tool? No, you don't. I think you can get by on some spreadsheets and doing it through DMs, but if you want to really scale it out, then I think having a solid tech stack is super.

Yeah, so. So, Josh, I want to move over to talking about type of results when this is done right. And so the biggest cost for a brand owner is the opportunity cost of this, wasting the potential of this in a year, trying it in house, et cetera. So when done right with a system like yours where you just plug it in, you start the machine, you're running it, what can a brand expect? I assume you probably work with brands that are high seven figures, eight figures, et cetera. What type of results have you generated for them?

Yeah, for sure. So like I mentioned last year we had a large brand that we generated over 100 million organic impressions at $8 cpm. And so just like really cheap eyeballs on product that then is leading to sales. And then that's also including 2000 influencer, like tagged influencer posts just from my team's ability. And so 80% of that is just through free product and the other 20% of that is through paid partnerships. But I think if you're, let's say, a $6 million a year ecom brand, that's just getting into influencer. I think in three months you can sign 100 creators and expect to start seeing 510 15 posts per week coming in consistently. I think that's a great benchmark is do I have consistently ten posts a week coming in from the last seven days.

That's a great start. And then focusing on generating awareness, what type of content is hitting the algorithm and doing well from a viral standpoint, and then really directing those creators on this is the type of content we would like you to emulate. So that we're getting into the algorithm and that it's performing from an awareness standpoint. It's not just content numbers, it's also awareness. And so what we'll do for our clients is really just building out creative briefs. And they're not scripts. We're really just giving them content that we've seen do well from a paid perspective on paid social or organic social, that then that creator can then emulate, not copy, but just emulate maybe the structure of that content. And we'll give them examples in that brief of this is what we like to see.

And so eventually we want to see a million organic impressions in a given month at an $8 cpm. Can we beat your Facebook CPMs? They're at $30. And can we get that down to ten to $15? And then also, how is that content performing from a paid social perspective? Getting your feedback from your media buyer? So, yeah, those are kind of like, some of the results is like five to ten posts a week, getting up to 100 creator sign total, getting up to a million organic impressions a month, and then just continuing to feed that funnel.

Josh, one thing that you just mentioned that I kind of want to go a little deeper on was the importance of creator briefs.

Right.

What are you sending to the creator? So, a, they have all the relevant information. Like you're saying there's content they can emulate. What type of swipe file from the brand do you see work best? Where the creator has what they need to create content and be authentic to the brand without being super overwhelmed and being like, oh my God, this is way too much for me to deal with.

Yeah, 100%. So I'll just say at a high level, we're not giving them a script, we're giving them guardrails. Right. Especially if you have a sensitive product that, especially in the medical device kind of realm or something like that, you want to make it super quickly and clearly say, do not say this. Here's are the things that you don't want to say. And then get to the point. Because essentially, if there's an influencer doing this for free product, they are not going to be spending an hour reading through your creative brief and going through your five different intro hooks that you would like them to film and the seven different product benefits. We want like three big call outs that ideally we like you to hit.

And here are some examples of content that have done well. So at the end of the day, we want to let the creator create and let them do their thing versus coaching them to read off a script. So I don't know, just know that they are going to read it for maybe two minutes. Like, their attention span is just as short as ours is. And so don't ask over the moon in those briefs.

You're not going to nail it every time, right? Like, even if you send guardrails and examples, then you'll get the ones that literally just copy the example. And there goes that campaign and lost products, et cetera. You really have to think at mass scale in order to be able to have a successful campaign. I'm curious, do you guys measure, when you talk about there's two sides here, there's the operations, and then there's a strategy as well. How does your agency engage? Do you guys layer it where it's like, well, if you just want the machine and the operations, or do you think it all needs to be cohesive and it's a whole thing in order for it to be successful?

Yeah, that's a good question.

Like the measurement and refining asides from just running the whole thing.

Yeah, for sure. So I think it's super important to have, number one, your tech stack dialed top level. We basically have three phases that we break down of what we call the influencer roadmap. So the first phase is what we call the design phase, and we're really going to design the foundations of your influencer program. So number one, who are the type of influencers that we want to go after? There's probably three to four to five different types of markets and different types of influencers that we can actually go after and that we can a B test week over week to see who has a higher opt in rate versus the next guy. So we'll kind of like stay in that niche. So maybe if you have a female led brand, maybe you're going into fitness, maybe you're going into cooking, maybe it's a stay at home mom, maybe there's all these different types of demographics that we can think about and a B test and then we're going to go build it out in a centralized hub like an aspire like a grin as a centralized tech sack. And then we're going to have a creative brief and then the scale piece really comes through team.

So what we have on our team is we have a dedicated account manager for strategy and then we also have a dedicated influencer specialist who's going to do all the sourcing and outreach. And on top of that we just have a VA to support on email replies. So we have responses ready to go for when people are responding to our emails. And so we're sending out 200 influencer emails per week per brand. So it's just a really high volume per brand. And then we're measuring those opt in rates and we're onboarding and shipping product. And then the last thing is just optimizing the program. So grabbing that content and doing the reporting.

So we want consistent reporting week over week of how many creators we sourced, how much product was sent, how many people applied, how much content was posted organic reach. Here's all that content that the media team can use. So it's just like there's just so many layers and then you can get into paid budgets and then that's a whole nother ballgame where you're negotiating with an influencer's agent, you're redlining contracts, you're going back and forth via email. They're super difficult. They want $10,000 for your reel. It's all super exhausting, but also fun because at the end of the day they come back with this when that one piece of content hits. We had one piece of content last, actually in February that had 10 million views. That's when I get excited, is like all this hard work was really worth it.

And so there's so many layers to this. But at the end of the day, when that content comes back and it's firing off, that's when it really gets fun.

Yeah, totally. I know when it comes to, you mentioned you have the VA on the replies. And when it comes to negotiations, which is what goes down on the email, I wonder if brands that are looking to work with you, et cetera, they're like, oh, free product. We don't want our brand to be damaged and thinking we're trying to take advantage of creators, et cetera. I've seen you on Twitter get shade for people saying you're giving creators sampling, et cetera. So I'm curious what your take is on that. For brands that are thinking that they need to pay up to not damage their brand reputation in quotation.

Yeah, I don't know. I think that it's pretty commonplace now for free product. I just think that it's just part of the game. And the reason you need to do a lot of a high volume of outreach is because of all the influencers who think they need to be paid for that content. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't be, but I feel like before payment comes dating, which is sending free product, I think that also the product needs to be good. If people aren't willing to do it for free, maybe it's because the product. Right? Like, I don't think that more people want another moisturizer in the mail.

Dude wipes toilet paper.

Yeah, exactly. But, like, my friend Dakota, he just sent me a pizza oven in the mail, and I was like, this thing is amazing. Like the wood fire pizza oven. And I was so stoked about it, and I started filming content in my backyard. I was know hoping that he would like it so that he can use it on ilads or whatever he wants to use it for. And he texted me and he's like, dude, this is the most high quality content I've seen in a while because he just has a hard time with customers actually making good content. And so I just think the product needs to be great. So if I want to send you guys your favorite men's apparel, you're going to be like, heck, yes, please send me that sick hoodie.

Or please send me that new pair of shoes. People get excited about that still. I get excited about that. I get stuff sent to me all the time. I've gotten cold plunges. I've gotten supplements. I've got all this free stuff just from being on d to c twitter that I get so stoked about free product. I think it's the same for influencers still.

I just think that you need to have a roadmap to getting them paid. So that was like, the first step is maybe a one off post, but then you have these other campaigns throughout the quarter where it might be a pay per post, where maybe it's a longer term engagement on running whitelisting ads, putting them on retainer to post every month. So I think that you just need to make that clear for the influencer.

Josh, one of the last questions I had for you is kind of like the overlap between, like you're saying, the influencer content, if you can get the rights to it and publishing it, and UGC, I think UGC traditionally has always done really well because you can test it really quickly. It's cheap to generate comparatively. But one thing that we've noticed in some of the creative that we're running is sometimes when we took a piece of creative that was done by a real influencer who's a really solid creator and lets it rip, it's just like eating all the budget compared to the UGC we're putting out. So is that something that you see as well? Where before maybe there wasn't as much content, now you really have to hit one out of the park to put performance budget behind it?

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. I feel like part of it too is we've had videos that will just be part of a mashup that keeps getting repurposed for that next holiday sale. At this point, that one video has done like seven figures, but it's like a part of a mashup. It's like not even a singular video. And so I don't know, I feel like I can't sit here and tell you what the answer is of what's going to work and what's not going to work. I'm not an ad whisperer like David Herman is, but I think that just having that content that you can then edit and making sure that you get the creative rights up front is the most important piece, because if you have to get them afterwards, the rate's going to be way more expensive. And so just establishing that upfront that you have that six month length and creator breaks is going to go a long way.

Well, Josh, I know we've peppered you here with questions. My last question is around the editing. How much is editing the content play a part in the whole process?

Yeah, so we have our in house editors that were able to turn around that raw footage into more direct response style content. But a lot of brands have their own in house teams, so I think it's like a big part of it. I think having captions, like most people are watching Instagram with their audio off. So just like putting in captions, putting in some music to make it feel a little bit more upbeat. But sometimes just throwing in the raw footage can help too, making it feel like it's not an ad so that people stay on and then they realize it's an ad, I think is kind of the name of the game because I don't know, I don't know about you guys, but nowadays I just feel like most ugc creators just feel so fake that you just know it's an ad right away and you just go on to the next thing. So I feel like this is so cliche, but making it feel as native and as authentic as possible is going to help you win in the algorithm at the end of the day. But again, sorry for the cliche sayings, but it's true.

No. And that is why you don't give a script, because that's when it just looks like a commercial that was pre planned. So Josh, thank you for coming on the pod today. For anyone who's listening that might want to learn more about aligned growth and keep up with all your stuff, where can they find you?

Yeah, if you just number one, follow me on Twitter at Josh jdurham on Twitter. That's where I'm most active. And then you can come to our website@alignedgrowthmanagement.com, and you can check out some case studies and feel free to book a call with me and we can chat about strategy. Whether or not you work with us. I'm always down to just have a conversation, but yeah, those are the two best places to find me. Sweet.

Thanks for coming on the show, Josh.

Yeah, thanks Josh.