Influencer Marketing for Ecommerce Growth: A Talk with Vivien Garnes

Yeah, I think I love this question. I think if you go on CrunchBase, which is the Bible for startups, if you type influencer, I think now there’s 1,000 results, something ridiculous like that. And when you look at some of them, there are a lot of specialists in that space—companies that do only Instagram, only Latin America, only the beauty industry, or whatever it is. And there are only, I’d say, a dozen or so big‑ish players who are true generalists offering a truly agnostic approach. What makes us stand out from this crowd? I would say two things: the very beginning and the very end of the chain.

At the very beginning, I mentioned influencer discovery. The traditional way is outbound: the brand reaches out to the influencer, pitches its value proposition, and tries to convince them to sign up for the program. That’s the old way, and it works to a degree when you’re just starting off. What we do instead works great inbound: I identify, among people who already gravitate around my brand, who’s influential, and reach out to them specifically. Here’s how it looks: first, we connect and integrate with your system of records—your Shopify store, your WooCommerce, wherever your client information lives. We cross‑reference with our inference database to identify influencers already in your network. That may not sound dramatic, but it is, on a couple of levels. Number one, these people are much more likely to work with you than if you reached out cold, so it’s a better use of your time. Number two, they tend to be significantly cheaper or even work for free because they love your brand and have spent their own money on your products, sometimes for years—you may not even have to ship them anything. Last but not least, authenticity is a major issue in this industry—many influencers get a bad rap for abusing brand partnerships. If you work with people who have loved your brand and invested in it, their content is as genuine as it gets, and you get better performance. By tweaking the very beginning of the chain, we maximize returns and minimize investment—time, overhead, and payments to creators. Step one: inbound influencer identification, a game changer.

At the end of the process, only a handful of companies tackle sales attribution. Through integrations with CMSs, Shopify, WooCommerce, we create custom coupon codes and sales‑tracking links so we know, at the influencer level, who has generated X conversions, Y GMV, and so on. This gives clients an ROI‑driven way to work with influencers: those who perform stay; those who don’t, go. And we don’t stop there—we identify new influencers every day. If you have 100 clients daily, we’ll spot two, three, four, five new influencers each day so your program keeps growing. That’s truly what makes us stand out.

So I want to say a bit of both. We’ve been super capital efficient. We did raise a little bit—we did the $3 million Series A in 2018. But if your audience is familiar with ARR, the annual run rates, which is your recurring revenue annualized, we’re well into the eight figures now. So our capital rise to AR ratio is really a fight in that sense.

Of course. Philosophically, I think there are two things you need for a martech company to win in any space. One is attribution: being able to prove your ROI to your clients, because nozzle grass is always greener if you can prove the value of your products. Not reserving to shop elsewhere—that’s only natural. The other is automation. When you look at all the great success in martech—the old is the goodies, HubSpot, Pardot, Loquat; more recently, Yoke Posts, Clavios—fantastic companies, all of them have a huge component of their product that’s automation. How do I save time on a very tedious process so my clients can focus more of their time on what matters? And these are exactly where we’ll invest. The goal is to make social commerce a cash machine on autopilot—something that generates revenue but doesn’t require much manual input. Philosophically, that’s the roadmap life.

But there’s more. There’s this idea of ubiquitous influence—meaning influencers are everywhere. They’re already in your network, but they’re literally everywhere. How do we tap into other places not necessarily thought about very much?

Let’s say you mentioned that one store in France when you were on your way back. If you’re the owner of that store, hopefully you’ll treat your customers well. But let’s assume that every time someone swipes a credit card in your store—and they’re already in your CRM—we can do that influencer matching exercise directly on your point‑of‑sale system. We can pop a notification: “This is PewDiePie buying wine for you—you should throw in a free bottle to try to get on his next video.” These little things to bring influence offline are a fantastic idea.

And there’s an infinite number of use cases. Let’s assume you’re a customer support rep for a very large brand. Every morning, you have 100 customer tickets to go through. How do you know if Kim Kardashian is among those customers? How do you know whom to give VIP treatment to, and turn a potential PR crisis into an opportunity? All these little Colin Rhys of influence—in what we call ubiquitous influence—would be really cool.

And just as a last note, I think the future looks like growth for us. We have a trajectory where we double in size every year, and we’re going to try very hard to keep doing that. And that’s what the future looks like for us.

Absolutely. The beauty of influencer marketing is that it can play up different strategies you have as part of your global e‑commerce growth plans. Influencers can be used to generate traffic, improve conversions by providing great content and testimonials. They can be used to reach your existing customers to improve repeat purchases. And it’s really a trail of breadcrumbs that should be across your strategy. There are several things you can do as a result. What’s working very well—and increasingly so—is that influencers aren’t just here to publish beautiful pictures on Instagram and drive likes as the end of it. It’s increasingly easy to prove their ability to generate traffic to your site and conversions. That’s really what we’re trying to nail at the moment. How do you propose the right custom coupon codes to the right people so you can actually attribute these sales to that creator? Specifically, how are things different on Instagram than on TikTok and YouTube?

That’s item number one. Item number two is how much freedom you want to give creators in your e‑commerce strategy on an editorial basis.

I like to think about this as a spectrum with two extremes. One extreme is absolute brand control: nothing gets out without my approval—my boss’s approval, my boss’s boss’s approval. There’s a 10‑page brief and a 20‑page agreement outlining exactly how it will work. Of course, the output is always on message, but there are drawbacks. Creators know their audiences, and it shows when they’re using someone else’s words and message.

At the other extreme is the laissez‑faire strategy: you send the product to the influencer and they do whatever they want, including criticizing your product. That’s it.

Most clients find the truth somewhere in between. That’s the spectrum we like to see.

100%, I think it’s going to be more and more the case every day. I think one telltale sign is the strategy of the platforms themselves. We’ve seen Instagram Checkout, TikTok Shopping, and all these platforms are implementing tools for brands to sell online directly to the audience. These tools can also be leveraged by third parties, including influencers.

We could imagine influencers selling natively in their posts by being connected with our CMS via Instagram Checkout, for example. The purchase experience is crazy: once you’ve entered your credit card information and shipping address, it’s virtually two clicks and that’s it. I believe it will be a powerful combination between creators and the platforms’ native tools.

I’m in full agreement. It’s only the beginning. You talked about segmentation and personalization with coupon codes or offers for specific people on specific platforms. That will be the value: we can offer the same across multiple platforms but personalize for each platform’s audience. There will be a lot of customization, which will be really interesting. Right now, it’s like email marketing: we sent one email to everybody without segmenting. Suddenly, someone who came in to learn about SEO gets influencer marketing content. There’s a disconnect. We need to do it differently. Content or offers tailored to a specific audience or platform—that’s the future.

We throw this term around—social commerce. I’d like your definition of social commerce, because maybe my audience doesn’t know what it is. It’s important to define it.

I might be looking at this in a very oversimplified vision, but social commerce is any sales you can generate on social media. That’s—in fairness—very new. Social media platforms have existed for 15 years or more, and more recently TikTok. It’s one thing to do ads to drive sales, but it’s another to have content published organically by people generating sales directly in‑app without exiting the platform. That’s a big change. A few years from now, we could imagine having an e‑commerce brand without an e‑commerce website, selling exclusively natively via Instagram Checkout. We’re on the brink of a revolution, and it’s an exciting time to be in this space.