 What's going on everybody? It's your man Kory and as you can see today I didn't have my fancy intro. I don't even have my white sheet behind me and the reason being is that I went on vacation not too long ago and before I went I accidentally deleted a bunch of videos that I planned to post. So in the meantime while me and my team work on rectifying my mistake I decide to shoot something anyway to give you guys because I know you haven't seen my face in a while. I know it's been a minute since I dropped something on the channel so let's get into the topic for today. Now what I want to talk with you about is the story of this influencer that's been going around. I know you've heard it and if you haven't heard this story yet both of your seatbelts because it's crazy but it's definitely a learning situation for all of you and luckily one that you didn't have to learn from from your own accord right. So what am I talking about right? So there's this teenage influencer her name is Ari and she has a pretty good following. She has a little over 2 million followers on Instagram. Now Ari was gearing up to release her merch you know she went through the whole nine yards she had models and photographers and makeup artists the whole nine yards the whole shebang. Now once it came time for Ari to put her product out or actually once Ari actually put her product out she ran into a problem and that problem was that she was only able to move 36 or 37 units of her merch and that sounds crazy right? A little over 2 million followers and only able to sell a little over 30 of her merchandise of her products and as crazy as it is as sad as it is like I said it really is a learning situation that thankfully for you you don't have to learn from your own accord. So let's kind of dive into those lessons and what exactly you should be taking away from her situation. And the first lesson is that numbers aren't everything I said is all the time it's not about how big the number is but it's about how engaging are the people in those numbers and how much influence do you actually have over those people right? So because of social media we tend to gauge influence by how many followers that somebody have right? It's because Instagram and all these platforms display our numbers like high scores so when we see someone with a really large following or a really large number on their account we tend to assume that that person has influence and that's not always the case. Influence is actually being able to move those people to an action so in her case that action would be to go and buy her merch. In your case the case of an artist that action may be to go watch your video or go listen to your song or go buy your merch or go buy a ticket to your show. So it's not about how many people are actively following you but how many of those people do you actually have influence over or engage with enough to the point where they'll actually do what you tell them to do. So when you look at these artists and you see oh this artist has 100,000 followers he has half a million or he has 10,000 or whatever that's not any real indication because you have to think about why those people dare. Some people come and follow you because they like the way you look. Some people come and follow you because they like your aesthetic. Some people follow you because they like this one antique that you did one time on a viral video but it doesn't mean that necessarily care about the things that you're going to push or that you're trying to sell to them and in the end that means you don't have any real influence over that section of your audience. They almost don't count in a sense. And the second lesson I want you to learn from this is that you actually have to push and promote and market whatever you're trying to sell no matter how big you are. Now I didn't follow her not really into I found out about this story but just digging through her profile it seems like she only had one maybe two posts about the product when it came out. I don't know if she did any stories swipe ups or anything like that but I do know that she wasn't running getting Facebook or Instagram ads. I know that she wasn't really doing anything to increase the visibility of it outside of just posting it that one or two times to her audience and then I think she said she sent the email out to some of her supporters and you know basically told them to go check it out. And that's a common thing that a lot of people tend to think. They tend to think that once they get this really large audience or you know this significant audience that all they have to do is post about it one time and people are going to flock to it and everything's going to be sweet and dandy and all that. And that's not true. You still have to go through the same steps of pushing and promoting something just like you would if you only had 10 followers the thing that you're doing is just scaling it and amplifying it to the point to reach these mass amounts of people that you now have access to just because you're able to post something and you know hopefully 20, 30, 40,000 people see it doesn't mean that one post is going to be enough. You have to actively implement some type of marketing strategy to put this product and put yourself in front of these people over and over again until they're ready to commit and make a purchase or complete the action that you're trying to get them to do. And I see this all the time where artists, you guys have created a merch product, you'll drop a new song, you'll post about it once, maybe post about it again, maybe you know run an ad for a week and then you stop and you wonder why people aren't going to check it out. No, marketing is not a one-time thing. It is an ongoing process. It is a process that has to be developed and tweaked along the way as you see things that are working and that are not working. But literally the worst thing that you can do is nothing at all and the next to worst thing that you can do is only do something one time. I promise you like you have to keep doing it. So those are just two quick lessons that I kind of got her whole situation. I'm hoping she learns from this situation. It's definitely a tough lesson to learn as a teenage influencer, you know, as someone who probably has all these millions of people or has had all these hundreds of thousands of people watching you. I know that's an ego, a big hurt to her ego to kind of see that thing happening. But like I said, this is something that all of you will have to deal with if you try to pretty much recreate the exact same thing that she was doing. And just to kind of get off on a little tangent, I seen a couple of comments that kind of made sense where someone said that maybe her followers were fake. And I did a quick audit on her Instagram. I'm using this one tool called IG audit. And it said that at least a little more than a million of her followers were real, meaning that she still had a million people that were potential leads that were potential clients or customers of her products. So I kind of ruled that one out. And the other comment I saw that made sense was that she's a teenager. A lot of her fans are children and other teams who don't necessarily have the money to buy merchandise and whose parents may not give them money to buy the merchandise because they're not fans of her, you know, their children are. And that kind of made sense. I kind of understood that. But that one ties back into once again, knowing your audience, knowing what part of your audience is engaged enough, or you actually have some type of influence over to get them to move to do that. And that also ties into once again, the length of your marketing campaign. Because even if we look at it that way, let's say her fan is 14 and that 14 year old does not have $35 right in the buy a t-shirt. If you keep pushing it in front of that teenager enough, eventually they may be able to convince their parents to give them the money, or they may even save up their own money to get it because you've been in their face for such a long time that they all they can think about is how you keep pushing this product and how they want it. So those are pretty much the two lessons that I want you guys to take away from this is one numbers aren't everything influences. Make sure you actually have influence over your numbers. And secondly, plan to promote plan to market, plan to implement a strategy for a long period of time. Don't just give it two weeks and then give up and move on to something else. And I love to hear you guys thoughts in a whole situation. Drop your comments down below. Let's talk about it. I want to know what you guys think about Ari and her entire situation. Outside that man shot to my guy Big Bang Reeves, man. He sent me a t-shirt. If you guys ever want to send me some merch, I'm always down to take some free clothes. Trust me. Just hit me on Instagram. As always guys, if you feel like you learned anything today, please like and share this video. Hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kory and I'll see y'all once I fix these videos. All right. Bye