Season 01 / Episode 019
Terry Adelman – Influencer Marketing with premier men’s influencer agencies
With Terry Adelman - Managing Partner, MENfluential
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Summary
On today’s episode … an influencer! Yup, it’s one of the hottest topics in affiliate marketing and today we have one of the best on the show.
Terry Adelman is our guest today, and he is the Managing Partner of MENfluential, an influencer agency that manages many of the premier influencers in the men’s category. JEBCommerce has actually worked with Terry for many years and have seen great success for our clients. In fact, we have two case studies: Bodybuilding.com and Indochino.
If you are looking to learn more about working with an influencer, you definitely want to listen to this episode. Terry talks about his career path and how MENfluential started. We dive into how it is to work with their agency as well as their influencers, how they judge success and what they actually do.
About Our Guest
Name
Terry Adelman
Achievements
Terry is currently a managing partner at MENfluential, a company that works with all brands and agencies (advertising and PR) that appeal to men, coordinating and managing successful influencer marketing campaigns.
Previously, he was the director of brand integration at AlphaM, a top men’s lifestyle blog and YouTube page with over 6 million subscribers.
MENfluential on the Web
Terry Adelman on the Web
Top Tips
When it comes to an influencer partnership, the main goal a brand should have is finding a balance of loyalty. Terry says a key element of influencer partnership is to work with influencers that truly like your brand and product, and who believe that your product will resonate well with their audience. It doesn’t have to be a brand they are using or wearing every single day, but the audience demographics needs to be immensely considered to achieve success.
Brands need to make sure their websites are user-friendly and conversion-friendly before entering an influencer partnership. Terry explains that the thinks of driving traffic to a website as driving someone to the showroom. A brand’s website must be able to handle the traffic coming their way. If your website isn’t user friendly, if it crashes, or if you can’t check out properly, you are going to lose customers. Traffic is important, but it’s also what a brand does with that traffic.
Highlights
If it’s working for you, keep going.
“One of the main messages we try to get across to brands running influencer campaigns is if it’s working for you, let’s keep going. We will continue to work with you in an organic and authentic way. We can change talking points, key messaging, call to action, create custom landing pages and continue to make the content stronger, but we should keep going. We have seen the more the content a brand puts out through these influencers, the more success and brand recognition they see overall.”
Quotes
[14:10] – “I didn’t enjoy sales at the management level…I realized it’s very difficult to hold everybody to the level that you think you would want to be at or you were at. At the end of the day, you realize that there will always be people that are more motivated and inspired than others. You see that when you are managing 20+ salesman. You have multiple C-D players and you must decide who really wants to be there, and ask yourself how much of your time spent on them is taking away from your A players?”
[30:01] – “I realized [while managing multiple influencers] I am not just a company representing influencers but I am also representing these brands. The brands are putting their money, their faith and trust in me and MENfluential and I thought, maybe we aren’t being who we set out to be. We shifted to an agency focus, or the middle man approach. Representing the talent, while also looking out for the brands.”
