Episode #59 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Ryan Hilliard

Marshall Nyman [00:00:01]:
Hello and welcome to the Performance Marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Nyman, founder and CEO of Nyman Co. Each episode, I will be bringing you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space where they share their career journey and insights about the industry. Today I have Ryan Hilliard, the CEO from Refersion and Influencer Marketing Hub. Welcome to the podcast, Ryan.

Ryan Hilliard [00:00:21]:
Thank you for having me, Marshall. Excited to be here.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:23]:
Excited to have you on. Let’s get right to it. Why don’t you briefly introduce yourself to the audience?

Ryan Hilliard [00:00:27]:
Yeah, great. So my name is Ryan Hilliard. I recently joined the CEO of Refersion and Influencer Marketing Hub. I’m based and born and raised here in North Carolina.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:38]:
Amazing. Well, how did you get your start in marketing?

Ryan Hilliard [00:00:41]:
Oh, my start in marketing was quite a, quite a journey. After graduating, I actually took a brief stint into financial services sales, selling life insurance. That didn’t last too long. I wanted to get my friends back, get my family friends back that when people think I was selling them something. So I actually had a close college friend sent me a listing for this internet marketing specialist job looked kind of interesting. Definitely left feeling like, am I having a George Costanza moment where I’m going to come back and like none of this is going to be here? But it actually turned out really well as an agency called ROI Revolution, e-commerce marketing focused. And I was there for 8 years, mostly on the performance marketing front and managing some teams.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:22]:
Nice. Pretty good run there. And then now you’re at Refersion and Influencer Marketing Hub. What did the journey look like to get from ROI to here?

Ryan Hilliard [00:01:30]:
So after ROI, I actually had worked worked with the same client a few times at a number of different SaaS companies and ended up joining him as a director of marketing at Lyfomic. We did everything from consumer mobile apps to enterprise health tech. Was there for about 4 years and then moved to the influencer side of things at HypeAuditor. Was there for, for 3 years leading North and South America, and then just recently joined Refersion and IMH.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:55]:
So for anybody that’s not familiar, who is Refersion? And who is Influencer Marketing Hub?

Ryan Hilliard [00:02:00]:
Yeah, so Refersion is one of the OGs in affiliate tracking. We’ve been around for about 12 years helping e-commerce merchants, predominantly Shopify, track and manage payments for their affiliates, whether they’re influencers or publishers or really any of the sort. Influencer Marketing Hub is a content publisher, really the sort of expert and authority in influencer marketing when it comes to like sources and citations on AI search results. We’ve been around for about 6 years, between 750,000 and 1 million monthly visitors where marketers are just trying to find those, those resources they need to run effective marketing programs.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:35]:
And how are you supporting those brands in your role as CEO?

Ryan Hilliard [00:02:38]:
Definitely a very hands-on approach when it comes to working with these two businesses. I bring a lot of pragmatic performance marketing focus, as well as some of the sort of product and brand approaches I’ve had to— those skills that I’ve had to hone through the years. So definitely working directly with our marketing team, with our sales team, working directly with customers. Prospects. Being early, I want to get very involved to understand what’s making people tick, but then I also just enjoy it, so I want to stay involved.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:08]:
What type of brands are seeing success on Refersion?

Ryan Hilliard [00:03:11]:
Our sort of sweet spot for Refersion would be these between $2 to $25 or $50 million direct-to-consumer brands, uh, CPG brands where they are growing on Shopify. We really support those businesses well. Of course, we We love really, really large businesses, but I think that’s where we have a good sweet spot in terms of accommodating the ability to pull on influencers, to pull on publishers, streamline those payouts in that process. And so that’s where we see a lot of success, though we’re not afraid to support folks that are really new where this is like their, their go-to channel. And I’m sure that you would admit that it’s not always the best go-to channel when it comes to getting your feet wet to try to drive new customers, but we want to make it easy for, for even emerging brands to track affiliates and make that process easy.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:56]:
Are there any product updates on the roadmap that you can share on the version side of things?

Ryan Hilliard [00:04:00]:
Yeah, in the coming weeks, actually, we’ve got it out to some beta customers, but we’re making a pretty significant change to the web app in terms of overall functionality and how it was built. And so folks are really going to see their workflows streamlined, try to remove some clicks and some steps that probably were added through the years. So I think functionally, it’s a huge win. We also recently rolled out an AI search tool for helping discover new influencers based off of your product categories and your target ICP. And the goal there is just to suggest quality, relevant publishers and creators and influencers, UGC potential, where you can just get in front of these potential affiliates to grow. Those are our probably biggest, biggest initiatives coming up.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:45]:
Anything on the Influencer Marketing Hub side of things?

Ryan Hilliard [00:04:47]:
Yeah, for Influencer Marketing Hub, we’re doing a pretty significant content shift that I think will be really compelling for marketers. We’re, we’re diving much deeper into brand stories and teardowns of strategies, trying to link success to, to practices and tools and sharing that with marketers so that they have something tangible that they can take to their own business. Obviously, all businesses are, are different, even if you sell the same goods. But that content strategy away from purely informational, I think, will be really, really compelling for a marketer, really interesting to read. And yeah, bring people back for more and more of those stories.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:22]:
Are there any conferences you or the team are planning on attending this year?

Ryan Hilliard [00:05:25]:
For conferences, we actually are going to be attending the ANTExpo. It’s sort of an Expo West side event, and we’ll be doing that. That’s actually next week, March 4th, I think is what it is. And then we’ll be joining up with folks at Affiliate Summit East because it’s in our neck of the woods where a bunch of our team is. And it’s— I’m in Raleigh, North Carolina, but it’s really easy to get up to New York. Direct flight, I think it’s like $97 round trip. So those are the two that we have sort of earmarked to be in.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:54]:
Why do you think a brand should get started in affiliate and influencer marketing?

Ryan Hilliard [00:05:57]:
Affiliate and influencer marketing are a way to really drive reach to relevant customers with a little bit less noise, right? Through the years, traffic has really consolidated around Google, consolidated around Amazon, and there’s a lot of folks there and it can convert really well. But that, that sort of congestiveness, all of the people there actually makes it really hard for you to profitably run campaigns. The benefit to something like affiliate or influencer is you can get this sort of mass scale of reach, but more cost-effectively, but it’s a way to kind of stand out when there’s a lot of noise going on. If you find the right partner, they’re not necessarily representing 10 of the same product. And so there’s this compelling opportunity to get in front of your target buyer and be the only product of its kind being messaged to those folks. Of course, the challenge is scale. You got to do it at scale to really make it mean something, but it’s just a way to navigate these really, really competitive waters.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:51]:
What excites you most about the performance marketing space right now?

Ryan Hilliard [00:06:54]:
For performance marketing, I think this—

Ryan Hilliard [00:06:56]:
it’s really interesting from my time at HypeAuditor and my time here at Refersion, seeing how folks are really leveraging the influence of an individual. Podcast ads were like a really big thing in 2012, and it was cool to see how that took off. And it’s almost like we’re, we’re doing that again. But there’s so much data for these individual influencers, these affiliates that you can also really measure it quite easily, understand their audience quite easily. So it’s almost like keyword bidding. But with that kind of display traffic reach. And so I think that that’s what’s really exciting is brands can actually show what their product is and how it makes them unique versus when it was all Google, maybe to a degree a little bit with Google Shopping, like it’s just text, it’s just a stock image of the product. But this way you can actually show this is the thing that we sell, this is why it’s compelling.

Ryan Hilliard [00:07:43]:
And I think that that’s really exciting for businesses. It should actually make it easier for businesses with cool products and great messaging to be successful. So that’s, that’s, I think the the coolest thing coming to performance marketing.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:55]:
What type of impact are you seeing AI make in the space right now?

Ryan Hilliard [00:07:59]:
There’s sort of multiple forms of influence AI is having. I think when it comes to user behavior, definitely seeing AI play a role as people are doing that preliminary research, like trying to narrow down from a slew of options when it comes to products, or even if it’s looking up agencies for IMH, people are trying, I mean, there’s thousands of them, right? And so they’re turning to AI tools and trying to provide it some context for this is what I’m trying to find. Even as a user, I’m trying to find this kind of product or something similar to this. And so seeing how that’s influencing searches and those users aren’t always then clicking on the source and like going to the website, what ends up happening is they type in the domain directly, or they type in the brand directly, and so that misattribution really ramps up. But I think the brands that think of this as, they understand sort of the halo effect of like the user journey is really complicated, we need to be getting back to sort of core profitability measures for our business, those are the ones that will be successful because they won’t obsess over this direct-click perfect attribution because that’s just non-existent. And I think for folks that heavily use Google, the push of Gemini further into Google Search is going to have a compounding effect on this. Right now, they’re completely distinct. Google has built in Gemini a bit, but probably wind up in a place where we want to keep it all into a single location versus having this is for this purpose and this is for this purpose.

Ryan Hilliard [00:09:45]:
And I think then we’ll just see that multiplying effect of like, it’s hard to attribute things directly because users are doing a lot of research over here and then they just make their decision. I don’t think there’s really a way around this. It’s just kind of the reality of it. But the more you understand, this is my customer, this is what I’m— this is who I’m trying to reach. These are my sort of core focus areas. It makes sense that people would be searching for these things. I think you’ll be successful. It’s when you start to discount what’s super logical and straightforward for the sake of purely attribution is when you can probably run into trouble as a brand and where AI will have probably a pretty negative impact on your ability to drive customer acquisition.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:28]:
What excites you most about performance marketing right now?

Ryan Hilliard [00:10:31]:
I think the most exciting thing with performance marketing is we’re beginning to recognize how disjointed the customer journey is. And even though there are lots of tools and lots of products on the market that claim we’re able to really just attribute perfectly, I think there’s a greater acceptance of users are on lots of different devices, lots of different browsers, VPNs and not when they’re working and when they’re shopping personally. And as we begin to accept that it’s imperfect, it allows brands to actually lean a little bit more into logical creativity. I know that this represents my product really, really well. I know that these are the people I want to reach. And instead of being obsessed with the exact attribution, I know that their journey is disjointed. And so I’m just going to invest here because I know it makes sense. I think one of the awesome things with performance marketing is that ability to attribute, but you can always over-attribute over time if you’re discounting the actual customer journey.

Ryan Hilliard [00:11:34]:
You can actually shrink your ability to impact your customer base and drive growth If you’re not aware that people go through these steps and we’re missing that on the attribution, we’re cutting off channels that we don’t think work because we don’t see them working. But I think it’s cool that marketers are actually getting a little bit more comfortable with the fact that we don’t know everything anymore. It’s not one click, one conversion.

Ryan Hilliard [00:11:59]:
You do your small purchase shopping on your little device and you do your big purchase shopping on your big device, but you might start your research in one place and end somewhere else. It’s just about meeting the people where they are, which I think is really cool for creativity.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:13]:
A lot of things going on with marketing, hard to track every activity.

Ryan Hilliard [00:12:17]:
Yeah, for sure.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:19]:
Are you seeing any interesting trends in the affiliate marketing space right now?

Ryan Hilliard [00:12:23]:
I think the most interesting thing, and I saw this transition happening when I was even at High Potter, is the shift from I’m just paying for posts and whatever I get, I get. Budgets were pretty flexible. Now marketers are very much, I have to produce some measurable value, whatever it might be, however disjointed it might be. So seeing an influx of influencer being much more interchangeable with affiliate, it’s not purely publishers and reviewers and trying to get into lists. It’s much more, I want to work with 100 micro influencers and I want them to drive sales. Almost like a brand ambassador, but almost less of an emphasis on the brand as it is, I’m just trying to drive performance. So seeing that influx of creators into the mix, I think is really interesting. Candidly, Refersion is, we’re trying to set ourselves up directly for that where we will track anybody from anywhere.

Ryan Hilliard [00:13:22]:
We don’t have to have them in our network, which is great for small merchants, but I think that that will really open things up further as publishing turns into, well, really any content format.

Marshall Nyman [00:13:36]:
Any challenges you see in the industry that we need to tackle?

Ryan Hilliard [00:13:40]:
Oh, I mean, there’s definitely the coupon codes and Chrome plugins that hit the news. It’s a constant thing is people siphoning attribution. I think that’s going to persist. It’s a really hard thing to tackle, but I think that there’s much more awareness of how different types of affiliate channels can help businesses in different stages, recognizing, hey, this type of channel, like a coupon site, might not be great for a very mature brand that has great awareness, but it could be perfectly suitable for somebody that’s just trying to get off the ground, leverage that reach that they have. So I think that that’s something that’s going to always exist. May be getting better over time, maybe new attribution models within this space of trying to recognize how affiliates contribute throughout the purchase journey. That could be worth consideration. But again, going back to what I was saying before, it’s not really something that we can always obsess over because we’re almost certainly going to discount the full value we’re getting from something.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:48]:
[Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] What’s been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Ryan Hilliard [00:14:54]:
I think for performance marketing, a lot of folks tend to just think of it as like it’s very, very analytical. But the most successful performance marketers that I know are really able to combine this, like, here’s what the data is saying, why is it saying this, and how can I creatively influence the result, right? Like, I can test my emails, I can just switch colors, blindly do best practices. But I think the coolest thing about performance marketing is it allows you to go, “Here’s where I think there’s a bottleneck in the system. How do I creatively tackle this problem?” And then I can measure it to see if it actually did anything. And I’m building all of that based off of some hypothesis of, “This is what I think makes sense. This is why it should behave this way.” I think where performance marketing can sometimes go wrong is when you just blindly do things because the data says it without any context. No idea why orange buttons are just better, so you always just do orange buttons, except Amazon doesn’t do orange buttons, so maybe it’s not better.

Ryan Hilliard [00:15:57]:
There’s got to be more to it.

Ryan Hilliard [00:15:58]:
And so I think that combination is just what’s really, really interesting.

Marshall Nyman [00:16:04]:
Well, a big thank you to Ryan for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into his background and how you can take advantage of Refersion. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Ryan Hilliard [00:16:15]:
Or you can reach out to me directly over email, ryan@refersion.com or ryan@influencermh.com. Love to connect with anybody.

Marshall Nyman [00:16:25]:
Again, thank you to Ryan for joining and to our producer, Leon Sonken. If you’ve enjoyed this content, please give us a like and follow. Thank you for listening in. I’m Marshall Nyman, host of the Performance Marketing Spotlight and founder and CEO of Nyman Co. Signing off. Thank you and have a great day.