Sedge Beswick: Innovative Influencer Marketing

On Episode Three of Season Seven, we interview Sedge Beswick. Sedge is CEO and Founder of SEEN Connects, an innovative Influencer Marketing Agency. Sedge shares some of her fundamental rules about Influencer marketing, discussing how her company creates brand campaigns and picks influencers for those campaigns, as well as her cutting-edge insight on the newest trends.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I am joined today by Sedge Beswick. Welcome to the podcast.

Sedge Beswick:
Thank you for having me.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Your Instagram profile says that you are a mama, a wife, and the CEO and founder of SEEN Connects.

Sedge Beswick:
Just about right.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. I assume that you picked those in order, you put them in that order on purpose.

Sedge Beswick:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Tell me about the mama. How many children?

Sedge Beswick:
It's a new thing. I'm a new mom.

Jon Pfeiffer:
A new mom?

Sedge Beswick:
Probably will move it to the back when I'm fed up, and exhausted, and she can talk back. But I have a nine-month-old daughter called Mari. Yeah. She is new to our family, and obviously the main priority, takes the lead role.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yes. That's exciting.

Sedge Beswick:
Yeah, it is. It's exhausting too.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it is. I have two, so I know.

Sedge Beswick:
Oh, so you can relate.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then tell me about SEEN Connects.

Sedge Beswick:
Yeah. SEEN Connects is a agency that I founded seven years ago now, and we basically exist to make sure that brands are working with influencers the right way, and that we are connecting brands to their audiences. Whichever platform, whichever influencer, whichever vertical that may be, it's the deep-rooted understanding of what makes their customer tick, and connecting them to their customer through influencers.

Jon Pfeiffer:
On LinkedIn, you say that your company is the best and most innovative influencer marketing agency.

Sedge Beswick:
Oh, God. I'm going to rewrite that, because that sounds so dry. I probably wrote that seven years ago, when it was just me in a room on my own, going this is what I want to be.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. But seven years ago, let's assume you did write that seven years ago. What was your goal for the company?

Sedge Beswick:
My goal was really clear. I wanted to prove that if you work with influencers the right way, they generate revenue, you can increase your budget to spend with influencers, because even then there were a lot of businesses doing it the wrong way that weren't attaching metrics to the performance of influencers, and it was very much, we've partnered with this person, that celebrity, and it looks good. But when you're then challenged by a CMO of what it's delivering, or how to unlock more budget, no one could answer that question. When I worked at ASOS, where I was at five years prior to setting up the agency, we had so much data. Data was king. Screw content, it was all about the data. We didn't know how to farm it. We didn't even know where to start, because we were looking at what is the vanity metrics, and then we were looking at the click-through, the conversion, and I could tell you Instagram posts to influencer, who was going to drive click-through, who was going to drive follower growth, who was going to drive sales.

When I founded the agency, I was going into businesses with one person on social team going, "We want to do this thing called influencer marketing, but what is it? What do we do?" I was like, "I can help you get more people in your team and this is how we'll do it."

Jon Pfeiffer:
How do you define influencer marketing?

Sedge Beswick:
It's a great question. I don't know whether this would vary based on market to market, and a lot of cynical opinions on the influencer space. But for me, influence marketing being defined is a person who is passionate about a subject matter, who can influence the opinions of others through the content, through the conversation that they distribute across their channel.

Jon Pfeiffer:
There's so much that I want to unpack that you just said a little bit ago, so want to go back a second. First, we were talking about it before we started the recording, but where are you physically right now?

Sedge Beswick:
I'm currently in London.

Jon Pfeiffer:
In London. Your company is in London, and New York?

Sedge Beswick:
Yes. We work across the whole of Europe, and we've got a network on the ground. But we've got two offices, the US office, and the UK office.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now, is it different? Do you have to approach a campaign differently if you are in Europe versus if you're in the United States?

Sedge Beswick:
It depends client to client, because the success metric, and the deliverables are different based on if we're working with an FMCG client or if we are working with a retail client. A lot of the worldly factors tap into that too, whether that is a war in Ukraine or whether that is Web3. But yeah, I actually think in the UK, from an agency perspective, account handling is stronger than it is from what I have seen in the US. And then I also think the interrogation of data is more advanced in the UK. But I actually think the creative is way stronger, the reach is way stronger from a US perspective. It definitely depends on the vertical, it depends on what the brief is. But I always say this to my team, we speak the same language but we are completely different. It's really understanding those market nuances, the state nuances, and how to get the most out of the influencers, and the celebrities that you're working with to really funnel that, those success metrics.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You've mentioned metrics several times. What metrics, what are the most important metrics you use to determine return on investment?

Sedge Beswick:
If you want one answer, and as you may have worked out, I'm not the best at giving one short concise answer to anything, because I get overexcited. But for me, right now, it is around brand uplift. I can't say to a technology business, where the item might be $8,000, I'm going to drive sales, but I can, if we're talking about a unicorn T-shirt that's $14. The barrier to entry, and the cost of unit has a significant impact on what I would make the success metrics. But universally, brand uplift studies, has the perception of your customer changed through understanding, and having a deeper understanding of our service product brand through influencer content? Has it shifted? Is it more positive? That for me is a really exciting metric that I don't think brands are doing enough of currently.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How do you measure that?

Sedge Beswick:
We actually have a third-party service that specialize solely within third-party data and performance, where you would basically survey customers who have seen and heard about the brand, and then survey them again, once they have seen the influencer content.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It's actually done with surveys?

Sedge Beswick:
Exactly.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Do they design the surveys or do you design the surveys?

Sedge Beswick:
We design them, and we design them based on what the brand wants the perception shift to be. Because ultimately, the creative brief that each of the individual influencers are then articulating, and bringing to life should help that perception shift of where that brand sits within the metrics of their competitors, or the positioning.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You talk about the creative brief, you mentioned it. At what point does the influencer become involved, or is it just presented to the influencer, "Here's the creative brief for this campaign"?

Sedge Beswick:
I think the biggest mistakes that brands and agencies make is saying to influencers, "Here's a brief. Execute it."Because the same way I know brand's social, and their audience better than anyone if we're working on that account, the influencers and the celebrities, they know their audience, they know what makes them tick, they know the type of content that they engage with, they know where they get the highest performance, they know, and they might need a bit of help with the strategy based on the level and tiering that they are. But bringing the influencer in on that creative journey and saying, "This is the umbrella. This is what we're looking to deliver. This is the creative overarching message that it all needs to ladder up to."

But what are your individual nuances to make sure that it's going to be the best piece of content for you, because it's not in the influence's interest for it to look hashtag ad, hashtag sponsored, and then not to feel genuine to their feed and to their audience. If it does look too, a brand has briefed me and I've just delivered, because they gave me a lovely check to go with it, the performance will absolutely dive off a cliff.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I can tell you, because I represent a lot of influencers, that's normally the way it is that you're presented with the brief, and go make your video.

Sedge Beswick:
100%. I always say to as many brands as possible, bring them in on that journey. These are the people you're going to work with. Also, working with influencers on a long-term basis versus a one Instagram post, a one TikTok post, a 30-second role within a YouTube video, they will... Again, the brand will get a deeper understanding of the performance of the brand, the customer, and the audience. My favorite stat is you have to see a piece of content 11.4 times from a brand, before you convert. If you're working with those influencers on an always on basis, it is the trust of that brand, and the affinity to that brand that will increase, that will have a better success story.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Let's pick a hypothetical cosmetics company.

Sedge Beswick:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Keep it vague.

Sedge Beswick:
We're really short of those.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yes. Yes. We need more. They have come to you, they have a new eyeshadow that they're putting out, and they want to create a campaign. I want to go through a kind of a parallel, how do you develop the campaign, and then how do you find the influencer? Because I have a lot of influencers listen to this podcast, and that's always the question I get is, how can I be found? Let's start with that.

Sedge Beswick:
Great question.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Let's start with that, actually. What advice-

Sedge Beswick:
Okay. If I was an influencer, right now, all I would be doing is amplifying my content on social for SEO. That is the keywords, it's the location tags, it's the audio speaking about, in the first three seconds, what's important to make sure this area has not been disrupted as it is right now, and so making sure that the visibility of your content is there, when you're searching keywords, you are going to be visible. It is going to be a huge shift for discoverability on social. That's the creative brief to... I would always start with a brand is, "What is it that you want? What makes your eyeshadow different? What is it that you want your customer, and potential customer to take away from seeing this activation?" You can't have 50 influencers all talking about completely different things, but you need to make sure that it is unique to those influencers.

I would always say then, "Who is your target audience and how do I make sure that the metrics of that target audience align to the influencers too?" Again, talking about all of the changes that we've seen with Apple, and cookie changing, I also think influencers can plug that black hole around understanding the audience demographic for influencers, understanding who the brand wants to target, and using that to make sure that the content of the brand is seen, amplify it, replay it, and target based on interest versus demographics is going to get the best success metric.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Basically, influencers should approach their platform like companies approach their website?

Sedge Beswick:
That's the right way of putting it.

Jon Pfeiffer:
To make it SEO friendly.

Sedge Beswick:
Yeah. But it is also, those social channels have their shop window too, right?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Right.

Sedge Beswick:
It's exactly how it should be.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Our hypothetical cosmetic company has come to you. From the time you start working with them until the time a post is actually posted, how long does it take?

Sedge Beswick:
I was actually on a new business call with my US managing director, and when I answered this question, because it's one of the ones the brand asked, he nearly had a heart attack. The reason is, we always ask for a minimum of four weeks, because that's when I can really get the creative team working their magic, make sure that the strategy is watertight. Last year, I received four briefs for Black Friday on Black Friday.

Jon Pfeiffer:
On that day.

Sedge Beswick:
Yeah. It was that we'd ask the brands, the brands we have on retainer and we were like, "Black Friday is coming, what's your campaign?" "We're not getting involved this year. We're not getting involved this year. We're not getting involved this year." And then it was a, "Oh, our CMO wants us to get involved. What can we do?" Influencers is not the easiest solution for that, but it's the time. The content is then not within the in-house team, and the social team. You've then got someone else talking about it on their channels, which also means those four brands were saying, "We don't want to talk about Black Friday, but actually they could do it in a really subtle way versus the brands, Amazon that are screaming Black Friday, Black Friday, Black Friday."

Jon Pfeiffer:
Right. I want to take you on your company's website.

Sedge Beswick:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You have three house rules.

Sedge Beswick:
We do.

Jon Pfeiffer:
One, rule number one is it's not about how much you pay, it's about how much you care. Tell me about that.

Sedge Beswick:
I think it just ties back into what we were saying, it's anyone can write a check, and you can get any influencer, whether that's a Kardashian, whether that's a Logan Paul, if you have enough financials to throw at said influencer. But if you want to create deep-rooted relationships, where you truly understand the influencer's audience, you have to see it as a two-way relationship. You have to see the influencers as an extension of your business. They've got invaluable knowledge and experience around social, around working with brands, around driving results, so don't just, to your point, say, "Here you go, here's a brief, go and execute it. You've got a day." Bring them in upfront, run focus groups, say to them.

Some of the best campaigns that I've done in my career are things that the brands never knew they were going to do. But I will meet a celebrity, I'll meet an influencer and I'll say, "What is that you're trying to do this year? What is it that you want?" And then we craft that magic of how it then works for a brand to do that in partnership with, and the audience believe in it so much more.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now, it is one of the early seasons for the podcast. I interviewed a guy who was the president of an advertising company that had done, I think 11 Super Bowls. He had been involved in 11 Super Bowl ads. On all of those ads, they do focus groups, as you've given that price. Do you do focus groups, it sounds like you do, on social media videos?

Sedge Beswick:
Oh, very specific. Have we done them on social media videos? We do do focus groups for our brands, and especially when there's products or new services that are being launched to market, or they're targeting a different demographic group. Have I done it specifically on... I don't think we have, specifically, on social and reviewing videos. No reason why we wouldn't, and shouldn't. It's just something that hasn't yet landed on our desk.

Jon Pfeiffer:
No. I mean, I've not seen it for my client, so I was just curious if that's even a thing.

Sedge Beswick:
Yeah. No, I haven't seen it either.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. Let's go to rule two.

Sedge Beswick:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Rule two, it's not just about reach, it's about authenticity, which we're...

Sedge Beswick:
The favorite word in influencer marketing.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Authenticity. What does authenticity mean to you?

Sedge Beswick:
Authenticity is the alignment of the who, and thinking about the persona of the brand, the persona of the influencer, so as a customer you're not seeing it and going, "Jesus, why on earth are they working with that person?" Or "Oops, Scott Disick again for a campaign." They're thinking, God, it made so much sense for that brand to work with that influencer. It should be brands that they've worn before. It should be experiences that they've talked through, or milestone moments that mean something to them. That's really where the synergy and the storytelling can come to life.

Jon Pfeiffer:
What advice do you have for an influencer on developing their authenticity?

Sedge Beswick:
Do not do what other people have already done.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay.

Sedge Beswick:
It exists. If it's done well for someone, it's there. I think some of the biggest success stories are, this space is heavily dominated now. It is not a new area, and so what are you bringing to the influencer space, to a brand, that no one else is doing or talking about yet? That could be giving career advice. We've got really an amazing influencer over in the UK called Mrs. Hinch who rose to stardom, because she's a cleaning influencer. She gives hacks, and tips, and tricks, and she's got, I think, about 6 million followers. She's worked with the biggest brands. Again, all the cleaning product brands were going, "Well, this is brilliant, because we've never authentically had someone that we could give our products to." I'm a big believer that you can't do it all.

Cleaning is not my thing. I have had the cleaner, when I couldn't even afford a cleaner, because I've just had to, and needed to, whereas this woman, it doesn't matter how big she is, and how many followers she's got, and how many hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of brand deals she's doing, she still gets pure, ecstatic joy from cleaning her house. I'm not saying now everyone go, and stop, and be a cleaner, but I am saying what she brought to the market was something that no one else did, and so have something. You can't be anyone else. You have to show up. You have to be you. Stop comparing yourself to everyone else, and talk about what is true and what you really believe in, and make that your strategy.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It's funny you would say that. I had a conversation with a client yesterday morning on that exact same topic. It's like, "You are unique, just be you. Don't copy somebody."

Sedge Beswick:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay.

Sedge Beswick:
But this is the problem with social media more broadly, right? Because you've got so much access to everyone globally, and all you're doing is comparing, am I doing enough? Is it right? Should I wear that top that way? Should I do my makeup that way, because that's performing for that person? And then you went, that's when you end up in a space where you get the imposter syndrome, you get the anxiety, the mental health impact of being on social. But if you are you, you also have way more confidence, because you know the person that you're profiling exactly.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. Our last rule, our third rule. Content that tries to sell doesn't, but content that tries to help does. What do you mean by that?

Sedge Beswick:
This ties back into storytelling. Again, there is no brand better storytelling in my opinion than a Nike. Nike don't post and say, here's a shoe, you should go and buy it. I'm sure everyone has watched Air, and they've seen the story of how Michael Jordan and the partnership with Nike came about. It is the deep-rooted stories that people can get on that journey that they can believe in, that they are invested in. If you are a brand and you literally say to me, "All I want to do is flog a load of product," it's not going to work. You have to then work backwards in terms of how do you want to make the customer feel? It could be the excitement that I can finally clean my daughter's sick off a carpet, because it's the best carpet cleaner possible. My daughter loves to vomit every evening, and that's fine. But if you say, "I want to be the number one cleaning product," and I just want people to start holding it up to their screen on social, it's not going to drive any impact for the brand.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I want to shift gears a little bit.

Sedge Beswick:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I want you put on your prediction hat. Yes. Look in your crystal ball. What's the next big thing?

Sedge Beswick:
What is the next big thing? I think this is, again, more of a smaller piece, but is I think the influencers that are going to thrive are the influencers that nail their SEO on social. I think that's a huge opportunity. The opportunity around TikTok shop, and the fact that within the first 90 days, the affiliate piece is only 1.8%, that's unheard of. There will be more brands experimenting within TikTok shop, and I think this is where influencers can play a huge part in the live shopping. Again, that's nothing new, that's not a big prediction, because we've seen that in the Far East, it's been hugely successful. But it's starting to work its way through other platforms in other markets too. I think TikTok are really dominating there with the user experience. And then I think from a brand's perspective, it is probably going more towards subculture, fandom, more niche communities, rather than mass, mass scale. I think, again, that ties back into we've done broadcast, how do we now support and make the subcultures feel heard, and build those subcommunity ethos?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Two things. One, you had mentioned TikTok. Is TikTok under fire in Europe? It certainly is in the United States.

Sedge Beswick:
I feel TikTok will always be controversial, and have something press-wise about it. Do I think it's going to go anywhere in the US, and that you're going to have two political parties agreeing? No. But that doesn't mean that something else won't come through, and work its magic the same way TikTok did, because at the start of the pandemic, we were saying to our brands, TikTok, TikTok, TikTok, TikTok, and their default was, "Oh, I'm not sure. I'm nervous. We'll just do Instagram." Now, every single one of our brands does everything on TikTok, so it is the brands, the influencers. If there are new channels, most of them will die a death, Clubhouse. BeReal isn't really doing what everyone thought it would do. But there will be the odd platform or the odd medium that will thrive such as a TikTok, and that's where the influencers, again, can have their unique selling point to a brand of, "I've got my audience here, let's do something."

Jon Pfeiffer:
It's so funny you had mentioned the Clubhouse, because when it first came out, I'm like, "I don't get it. It's like listening to BaD Talk Radio.

Sedge Beswick:
Clubhouse was the one for me, where I was like, "Oh, I'm old. I don't get it. I don't want to be on it. I don't even want to download the app. Someone in my team's going to have to tell me what I need to know here."

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. I want to shift it back to personal, a second. Where are you from originally?

Sedge Beswick:
I'm originally from a town called Whitchurch, which is in Shropshire. It is about an hour from Manchester, an hour from Birmingham, very Midlands.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I was listening to an interview earlier of you, where one of the first questions was, "What's your soccer team?"

Sedge Beswick:
Oh, yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It's a very British kind of question, so I will ask it. What's your soccer team?

Sedge Beswick:
Well, I support Manchester City, which is great at the moment, because we are winning leagues left, right, and center.

Jon Pfeiffer:
There you go.

Sedge Beswick:
I'm not a glory hunter. I was born a blue.

Jon Pfeiffer:
What set you down this path of working with influencers?

Sedge Beswick:
I have had a very unique/ weird career, where I worked in social media when everyone thought I was just sitting there poking friends on Facebook all day. I couldn't explain to anybody why a brand was paying me to work on social. Naturally, everything I did then was working with influencers before they were called influencers. The more time I spent as the agent, as this area of the industry was maturing, the more I believed in it, the more excited I got, the more data I had access to show that it works. I just became this really nerdy chick that wanted to talk about influencer marketing all day, every day.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now, it's trendy, so you're on the front-end of that. What are you working on right now?

Sedge Beswick:
I actually am working on a repositioning of the business, because everything you've actually just read through on our site, and how we have marketed ourselves as an agency has been the same for the last seven years. The influencer model has evolved so aggressively that I have a paid media team. I have a studio that does shoots, whether that's still video above the line, and me saying we run an influencer marketing aggressively undersells the capabilities of my team. When I scale back to why we exist and what we are good at, we are really good at connecting brands to their audiences. That might be the subculture that I talked about, or it might be the studio team, because why on earth would you just talk to a sneaker head when you can put a sneaker head on above the line? Now, she can talk about that for weeks and days to come, because it's an experience that they've had with a brand that no one has ever given them those opportunities before.

I'm doing a lot of that. I'm doing a lot of the site rework, the marketing rework, the creds work, and it's quite good coming back from maternity leave, coming back in fresh and saying, "Cool. What do we now stand for and how do we make sure that we're ahead of our competitors, and one step ahead of the wider industry?"

Jon Pfeiffer:
How do you keep up with what's going on in the industry? What's your go-to source?

Sedge Beswick:
Honestly, my go-to is chatting to as many influencers, and celebrities, and agents as possible, because they're in the thick of it. We've got relationships with platforms. I've got great relationships with Meta, with TikTok. They'll tell me what's coming from a platform basis. They'll send me case studies or unique things that have happened on platforms, but you still need to be able to do my business well. You need to know how the influencers are feeling, what the market is saying. It comes back again to what I was saying around, my job is not just to say to a brand, "Cool. I'll execute that brief that you've asked me to do." In order to connect people and create those results, I've got to connect with my brand manager and understand what she or he really needs. Maybe they just want a really good campaign to win a load of awards to get promoted, so we'll do that.

The same way from an influencer, it's like let's not ask them what they've done. Let's ask them what they really want to do. How do we then connect them with those brands, where they get to do something that should be the best thing they've ever done in their career, that they are so immensely proud of, they keep talking about it. I learned more from going out and speaking to influencers about their frustrations, or mistakes that brands are making, to help constantly evolve our offering.

Jon Pfeiffer:
If somebody wants to work with your company, how can they find you?

Sedge Beswick:
Well, I have a wonderfully SEO friendly name. It turns out there aren't many Sedge Beswicks in this world. I am all over LinkedIn, and I get back to everyone on LinkedIn. I would just say that or via our website, which is seenconnects.com.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Thank you.

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