Shipt is a leading same-day delivery marketplace with personal shoppers who handpick and bring products you want right to your doorstep. We’re here today with Riley Cronin, Director of Influencer Marketing, who’s going to share some insights with us.

Riley Cronin is a seasoned influencer marketing strategist who has built and managed Shipt’s aggressive influencer playbook to support rapid national expansion since 2015. Shipt was acquired by Target in Nov. of 2017 for $550M and continues to grow as a nationally recognized brand. Riley believes in a relationship-first approach and uses next-level connectors to create integrated campaigns with long-term value.

Now on to the interview and complete transcript below or check it out on YouTube.

Can you give me a little bit more background about the delivery service?

Riley Cronin: Definitely, so Shipt is a membership-based grocery marketplace. You can essentially get fresh food, household items, or alcohol delivered straight to your door, so it’s actually, Shipt just simplifies people’s lives and saves time for them to do what matters most.

Sherri Langburt: Alcohol, that’s pretty interesting. How does that work?

Riley Cronin: Alcohol, yep. Well, it depends on what market you’re in and what stores you’re ordering from, but yeah, alcohol is somethings a little bit newer. But yeah, it depends on the retailer and it depends where you live.

Sherri Langburt: Got it, got it. Tell me a little bit more about, I mean, I’m sure it’s a very big role, but influencer marketing with Shipt.

What does your role look like at Shipt?

Riley Cronin:So my role is, it’s a fun one. It’s really exciting. Essentially what my role is, is to develop relationships with big influencers, small influencers, micro, macro, and develop creative campaigns to help reach new audiences. That’s essentially what it is in a nutshell.

Sherri Langburt:And so when you talk about micro, macro, I think everyone defines it so differently.

How do you define micro versus macro influencers?

Riley Cronin: Well, I would say micro for us is anything between 5,000 to 100,000. A little bit, might be bigger of a scope than most people, but for us, I think 100,000 plus would it be your macros. But even beyond that, we call them tier one influencers. Those would be your million and above. I think right now, just where our program is at and our business is at, we’re focused more on the tier one campaigns, since we are more of a … We’re a national company now, we’re nationwide, we’re focused on influencers that do have that bigger reach and a bigger audience. So, we’re playing playing on a bigger stage now.

Sherri Langburt: Let me ask you, so that’s a great question that comes up is that does engagement start to go down?

Do you see engagement dipping when you go with bigger influencers?

Riley Cronin: Typically it does, but every now and then you’ll come across special cases where there’ll be an influencer that has a million plus following and their engagement rate is pretty strong. In fact, we’re working on a campaign right now with Matthew Noszka. He has a million followers. He’s having his moment right now. He’s coming off the back of a Netflix show and he’s a model, entrepreneur, lives a busy lifestyle, but he has a pretty high engagement rate.

Even with a million followers, his engagement rate is between five and 7%, and sometimes even more depending on the content he posts. But typically you’re right. When you do start to work with those higher tier influencers, it’s just the nature of the game. Their engagement does start to fall off.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, and it’s also, I think you’re looking at different influencers. If someone has that broadcast or Netflix exposure, then maybe it boosts and helps his engagement. But it’s definitely something that we kind of are always like what’s the engagement rate and what happens as you get bigger?

How do you go about finding these influencers, whether it’s the micro or the macro?

Riley Cronin: For us, it’s on a campaign basis, right? It depends what our outcome is or what goals we’re trying to accomplish. But everything for us is, it has to tie back. It’s two things, right?

One, the influencer has to love our service and find use for our service, and the second is their audience has to be similar or tie back to our core member personas or demographic. If both of those things check out, we’ll just start to look for influencers that really fit with the storyline that we’re going for, so whether it’s going after the health and wellness or health and fitness vertical.

Health and fitness influencers that have a certain amount of reach, and then from there it’s just about doing the due diligence, checking out their brand, seeing how their content performs, seeing how well they do on camera, and seeing if there’s the potential to do an in depth creative campaign because for us it’s not…

Gone are the days of really expecting influencer campaigns that are just a review of service or a story post and a swipe up.

Those days of seeing those things really perform are gone.

For us, it’s all about we got to see potential in a longer term relationship and an ongoing partnership. We also see that those type of campaigns perform better, right?

Influencer marketing is all about leveraging trust with your audience.

Influencers that just do one and dones, it really comes off as a transactional thing or a paid promotion. We don’t avoid the pay promotion because we are paying these influencers, but we try to [inaudible 00:05:23] as organic and authentic as possible, and if someone’s going to post about us over a longer period of time, it’s usually because they love our service, right, and their audience is… That’s going to be really well received.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, for sure. There’s also, it’s a different part of the funnel, and I think if you keep repeating the message it reinforces so more people are seeing it more frequently. It takes a longer sales cycle on the influencer content side. Obviously there’s a lot of discovery platforms and influencer monitoring.

Do you use any SAAS platforms to help with influencer discovery or tracking?

Riley Cronin: You’re going to be surprised. We do not use any tools or technology at the moment.

Sherri Langburt: Awesome.

Riley Cronin: It was really the foundation of our company. We used to call ourselves a relationship based company with good tech, and the relationship came first. That’s kind of what we took to heart in our influencer marketing strategy and playbook. We want to keep the relationship at the center of everything that we do, so we came up with a concept we call next level connectors.

What we saw in the space is, if you look at influencers, they always have just in the community there’s these people that have influence over the influencers or authority with the influencers and have relationships with a lot of influencers in this space.

What we found was if we partner up with these next level connectors, we can work on the back of a relationship, form a partnership with them, and then just work through them to develop campaigns that are very successful for us. So, we’ve been using the next level connector model.

We have a handful of them and essentially what we do is we just work through their networks. But the good thing is they have a direct relationship with the people that we want to work with.

Influencer marketing is relationship marketing, so if you can keep the relationship involved in it, that’s going to lead to a more successful campaign.

We’ve just found that to work really well for us, but we are currently looking at tools. I think in 2020 we will add tools to our playbook just to give us just some more capabilities on finding more influencers outside of this stuff we’re doing. But we’ll keep that mix. It’ll be when we do add the tool, it won’t replace the next level connector model. It’ll be a blended approach that we’ll do aside that, because again, we always want to try and leverage relationships when we can. That’s really what’s worked for us, and we’ll continue doing that.

Sherri Langburt: That’s how it all got started. Right? I remember when I started this agency, it was all manual. So, that’s how it works. But when you talk about these next level connectors …

Does that mean that the influencers that they have relationships with, do they end up becoming influencers who work with you more on an organic basis?

Riley Cronin: Yes and no. What we’ll do is we’ll partner up with these next level connectors, right, so we form a partnership with them and they’ll work on our behalf. We work with the next level connectors to identify certain influencers to support the campaigns that we have going on.

So sometimes we can leverage their relationships, and they just have people that have heard about Shipt and love Shipt. Or they’ve seen it, they’ve seen other people posting about it and they just want to try the service. There will get the added value and added of the relationship. But most of the time what we’ll do is we’ll just really leverage their relationship to get as much out of a campaign with an influencer as possible.

Riley Cronin: What you’ll see is people are willing to go above and beyond for their friends and their relationships, right? Typically you’re going to get hit with people’s standard rates, and they’re going to want to get paid a little bit more, just get paid for their basic rates or their standard rates. But work on the back of a relationship, what we’ve seen is these influencers want it just… It’s a good way to start because we’re not starting cold. We seem to get more out of them. They’re more willing to do… To add to deliverables or go above and beyond, and it helps us save money because again, we’re working through relationships.

Sherri Langburt: When you talk about compensation, I know it’s a very hard number to figure out with each influencer. Are there any benchmarks that you look at? Are you looking at the CPMs, are you looking at…

How do you figure out compensation?

Riley Cronin: For us, it’s a pretty dynamic thing, right? It’s always based on a campaign basis, so we take and we do consider what the CPMs are, what their engagement rate is, what their following size is. But for us, all of our campaigns, mostly our multilayered campaigns, so we’re not… We’re rarely paying someone just a post about our service.

Most of the time what we’ll do is we’ll develop moments and within those moments, it could be an influence or hosting a dinner, and at the dinner we come with our own content team and have them invite some of their influencer friends that are influencers in their circle to come out. They’re doing social coverage of the event and posting stories.

Then we have our content team pulling influencers aside and just getting testimonial content. We’ll take that testimonial content and we’ll have it help support our funnel or media buying strategy. We like to go as many layers deep as possible. You look at influencer marketing as… Or not a silver bullet approach, but a lead bullets approach.

We try and give ourselves as much room to be successful and reach their audience as possible.

Depending on how many layers deep we go with them is the price, and ..

it’s less about their following size. It’s more about the time it takes to develop the campaign and how long the campaign will run.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, and it sounds like a lot of what you’re doing is even beyond them. It sounds pretty experiential.

Riley Cronin: Exactly. That’s something that we’re really focused on.

We found a sweet spot on the experiential side. We call it creating moments.

We like to build our campaigns around moments. It’s just been super impactful and helpful to, one, reach new influencers, right, being able to work on a campaign with X influencer, but having this moment or this dinner or this experiential event and using that time to also build relationships with influencers in their circle. Anytime we could do anything on the experiential side, we’ve just seen it really work for us. I think more brands could be doing that.

It’s also a way to maximize the time you get with an influencer and just get so much content to help fill the funnel. Or I have a bank of content that elevates your brand and could be used on social. It’s just content is the name of the game and moments allow you to get so much content in a short amount of time.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, we talk about it. Same thing here, like moments, occasions, celebrations and at every single step of the journey. Then I guess it’s interesting for me, I saw one of the things that you did was about the flu and moms delivering flu medicine or something like that. Could you tell us about that?

Riley Cronin: Exactly. When you get older and you get the flu, and you’ve got your own stuff going on, the flu could really stop you dead in your tracks. Growing up, if that was something that you experienced with your mom, she would typically take care of you.

Shipt can be just like your mom taking care of you, right? When you are feeling sick and you don’t want to move and you don’t want to go to the store and you’re just feeling terrible, Shipt can be there. It’s almost like delivering a breath of fresh air, right? That was a fun and exciting campaign. It’s actually still ongoing right now.

Sherri Langburt:Oh it is? I think it’d be delivering me chicken soup, but

Riley Cronin: Yeah, exactly. They could be anything, right? It could be your typical flu medicine, it could be tissues. Whatever it is, the Shipt platform offers so much to where it’s not just grocery, right, it’s household items. You can order stuff from the pharmacy, so that was the idea behind that campaign.

Sherri Langburt: I think it was really clever. I guess my next question is, we’re getting a lot of questions about the scope of work. I think a lot of companies think, okay, we’re going to work with influencers and then things could fall flat. For me, it’s really important to have a very detailed scope of work. What are some of the elements, if you could share with us…

What do you include when you engage with influencers to make sure that they’re kind of adhering to everything that you want them to do?

Riley Cronin: Yeah, the scope of work for us, what we’ve found is details are good, right, so details on the deliverables, the expectations, what you want tagged, specific hashtags, just giving them kind of the full plate of what you’re kind of expecting is always good. Especially what we found is at the beginning we always want to discuss and agree on content usage and licenses, because that’s really where we see a lot of impact.

We don’t want to just depend on the influencer posting once. If we could own that content for a certain amount of time and deploy it on our media buying to go after certain verticals or use the testimonial content to speak to a new audience, that gives us more flexibility and room to be successful.

We’ll always want to try and figure that out in the scope of work, but the one thing that we try not to do is …

we want to give them an arena to play in but we don’t want to constrict an influencer.

Influencers know their audience and we want to let them do what they’re best at, which is creating content. We never want to put too many restrictions on what they talk about or how they say it, because they know their audience best and we want it to be as organic and authentic as possible. Giving room for some creativity with boundaries is something that will lead to more successful campaigns, at least what we’ve seen in the campaigns that we’ve done.

Sherri Langburt: Okay, so I’m going to ask you this because I am in full agreement. What do you think about legal reviews on influencer content? I know for some industries like pharma and healthcare or alcohol, it might be a necessity, but generally if it’s not a regulated industry, legal reviews on influencer content.

Riley Cronin: Can you give me a little more context on how that would apply to Shipt?

Sherri Langburt: Well, not for you, but I guess what you’re saying is, you give them the scope of work and you have this understanding, but you also want to give them the flexibility. We oftentimes see a lot of brands saying, oh, legal needs to review this, and it’s not a regulated industry. What are your thoughts on that?

Do you think that there should be around a legal review on all content, or it’s a case by case basis?

Riley Cronin: I personally am against that. I just don’t see, again, it’s all about their relationship and making things easy on them, will typically lead to them wanting to do more stuff, right? Adding more steps in the process, it could be unnecessary. I just don’t think it leads to very successful relationships, and I don’t always think it’s a necessity.

We’ve never really had an issue with that, and we don’t have legal review any of the content that we have our influencers post. We have legal review our agreements before we send them, but what we do is in the due diligence, we never want to work with an influencer that we think is going to do something that’s risky or damaging to our brand. In that process upfront, we’re only trying to select people that we feel like are going to be a good representation to our brand, and we have trust with.

Sherri Langburt: That makes sense, and I think also to your point, the legal review, it could take away the creativity. Not because the lawyers are doing it, but because the influencers get nervous that the lawyers are going to review, so they end up being more safe in terms of what they’re producing.

Riley Cronin: The less steps like that, the better. We always want… Again, it’s all about the relationship to us. We want to add as much value to them as possible and give them just… Make it as easy on them as possible, and I feel like that’s just… Usually, at least in our experience, it’s just not a step that’s been necessary or do I think it’s necessary.

Sherri Langburt: I’m in agreement, unless it’s regulated of course. I guess my other question would come from shoppable content. Obviously you’re a delivery service, but you deliver a lot of things.

How do you leverage influencers and are there any tips or tricks in terms of having them make their content more shoppable?

Riley Cronin: Definitely. With our platform, we do a lot of influencer marketing on specific a CPG brands, whether it’s Kraft or Dr. Pepper or… There’s just a lot of campaigns that we do that will be specific to a category. It’s really helpful for people to kind of get the full picture and understand what the Shipt service does and how it could add value to them. But as far as making influencer content more shoppable, it’s kind of like what I said, we always want to leverage the influencer strengths.

The influencers, they know their audience, they’re an influencer because of the content that they create. We try and give them the creative ability to tell their story and post their testimonial content and talk about how they use the service and how they love the service. That’s usually where we get our best stuff that performs the best. It’s really in this playground of allowing them to just be themselves and be creative as long as it’s within the arena that we set up for them.

What is the most memorable influencer marketing campaign you’ve done or experience of working with an influencer?

Riley Cronin: 100%. I think to me the most memorable one was our campaign with Gab Union that we ran last year, Gabrielle Union. It was our first crack at really working with a nationally recognized influencer. It was a three month campaign, and this is where we really honed and crafted our multi-layered strategy. At the time too, this is something that we always look for. We always try to find influencers that are having their moment. We talked earlier about how Matt was kind of having his moment with his Netflix series and the things that were going on and in his life.

Well, at the time Gab was having that moment. Her husband was just coming off of his Hall of Fame tour, where every NBA stadium was recognizing Dwayne Wade and doing this awesome like honoring of him. She was on America’s Got Talent. She’d also just booked a show on on LA’s Finest with Jessica Alba.

Gabrielle Union was having that moment and her community was really engaged and she was growing fast. We tried to leverage that.

Well, what we did is, and we do this for every influencer, we gave her the service to try multiple times. So, before we even talked about what a campaign could look like, we just made sure that she did love the service. We actually got a phone call one day that after she had had a membership for about a month, she had to get something delivered on set that she forgot. She placed a Shipt order, they delivered it to her on set and she was just super amazed. She loved the experience, and she just saw how everybody’s reaction like, damn, I can’t believe you got that delivered to you on set.

She called us, she was really excited, and she wanted to work with us. The campaign was a three month campaign. The first portion was we went to her house and we filmed a full day of testimonial content about her busy life and what she had been going on.

She was recently a new mom and how she was using the Shipt service to help support her and her busy lifestyle and all the things that were going on. Then at night we hosted a dinner party for her and her friends, got content at the dinner party that we used to run a sweepstakes on social for three months, and the sweepstakes was, we offered our members, 10 of our members, the opportunity to come watch the LA’s Finest finale party, which was another event that we hosted.

Sherri Langburt: Wow.

Riley Cronin: Yeah, so it was an awesome campaign. There was a lot of layers to it. We got a lot of amazing content and the campaign lasted three months, and we ended it with that LA’s Finest finale party with Gab that we hosted. Then we also use that as a moment to develop relationships with other influencers that we ended up doing campaigns with, so it was just, it was really successful all the way around. It was again, something that we were able to create some moments out of and also develop a really good relationship with Gab. That was the most memorable campaign to me.

Sherri Langburt: That sounds awesome. Now I have two questions from that story.

How did the Shipt driver get on set because wouldn’t that be really hard to get onto a set?

Riley Cronin: Our shoppers, they really operate by this theme of over-delivering delivery and just going above and beyond and doing whatever it takes to deliver. I would imagine they had some hoops to jump through, and there was some back and forth going… Texting back and forth to figure out how they could do that, but they were able to get it done. Thankfully they did because that moment really just set the stage for a really beautiful relationship and a really successful campaign.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, it’s something that it’s taking it to that next level, making that kind of service work in a that you would never think it could work, so that’s brilliant. What do you think… Obviously we’re in 2020 and everyone’s talking about the new decade, let alone a new year.

What do you think the future is for influencer marketing?

Riley Cronin: I think it’s really exciting. People ask me this a lot, do I think it’s going to stick around? What do I think’s going to happen, and I think it’s only going to continue to grow. I think influencers are getting better and more creative at the content that they post, but I think the future you’re going to see a lot of brands start to test out new platforms. I’ve got a close eye on TikTok right now. I’ve seen some really… I’ve seen brands like Oreo and Pink and just some big brands do some really creative things on TikTok with influencers that have performed outrageously well, so I think you’ll start to see brands be more comfortable testing on new platforms.

I also think that brands will get more comfortable testing new things.

I think influencer marketing is just as much science as it is art.

It’s a combination of the two, and I think all of the beauty really comes in the creative strategy. It’s being willing to experiment and test things. I am also seeing a lot more influencers collaborate, which is pretty exciting, seeing people bring their audiences together and create content together. I think that creates some really awesome moments for brands to get involved in a new way and reach new audiences.

Sherri Langburt: That’s really helpful. Thank you. Okay, my last question, which I always ask, and it’s a hard one, but ..

Name an influencer you love to follow, but hate to admit that you do.

Riley Cronin: It’s an interesting question. I follow a lot of influencers. I don’t typically have someone that I hate to admit that I follow, just because I think there’s something to be learned, especially when you’re in this industry like we are, right? There’s always something to be learned from following an influencer, so I don’t have someone that I really hate to admit. But I would say, I would flip the question and recommend maybe some people that listen to this to follow, some people that I really love to follow, and these are people that we’ve worked with.

Two that really stand out is Jessica Hall, and obviously, our business is mostly focused on moms. Jessica Hall is, she’s a mom, she’s an entrepreneur. She’s really good at posting content. She does some of the things that I talked about. She collaborates with other people. She’s doing some stuff with Hilary Duff right now, so she really understands the influencer game, and I think if you’re in our position or you can learn a lot by following her.

Another person would be Emily Frisella who is, she’s amazing, an amazing influencer, but she has a cookbook, she has a podcast, she has multiple businesses. She’s crazy busy and she uses Shipt about four to five times a week to support her busy lifestyle, so she’s an amazing influencer to follow because she posts such motivating content. She shows you how to balance her life, and still keep her fitness and her health with balancing her business and all of these things. I think those two, those two females and two influencers really stand out to me that if you want to follow some exciting people and learn something, those would be the two people I would follow.

Sherri Langburt: Well, I’m definitely, I need some fitness help to keeping that in my schedule, so I’m definitely going to be on the lookout, and I just want to thank you. This has been extremely, extremely insightful, so thank you, Riley, for joining us, and we’re going to keep watching everything that you’re doing and it’s super exciting, so we wish you all the best.

Riley Cronin:

Thank you, Sherri. I appreciate it.

Sherri Langburt:

Thank you.