Ariel Vaisbort is the Influencer Coordinator at OLIPOP. After starting off as a part-time employee, Ariel quickly transitioned into running influencer coordination with OLIPOP full-time. Previously Ariel has developed social media for a number of companies including Her Campus Media, BANGS Shoes, and the Heritage School of Interior Design. She is also proficient in working with influencers and selling consumer products via e-commerce. OLIPOP is a beverage company that offers a healthy alternative to soda, focusing on microbiome and digestive health support. 6:48 – Don’t give people a scriptThe audience can tell when an influencer is just reading from a script. If you want people to engage with your product, you have to allow the influencer to speak authentically.“When we work with influencers, we don't give people a script. As a customer, when I see someone reading the script like, ‘Here's the product, I like the product. It is so good.’ Snoozefest. That sucks. That sucks to watch. So for us, as a brand, we don't give people a script. We give people, ‘Here's information about the brand. Here's what you could say, but we want you to talk about what is most impactful to you as a consumer of the product.’ And the biggest thing that we look for when we're working with new people is, does this person know about the product? Have they tried the product? Do they like the product? Because then it's going to come across so much more genuine and so much more real. And so we have people, and we want them to talk more about how the product works for them. Is it getting them fiber? Is it replacing a soda for them? Is it a healthy treat that they switch to instead of drinking wine? And we're trying to lean a lot more into this storytelling aspect and into more genuine stories about why the product is making a difference for people.”8:52 – Trust your influencersInfluencers know what their audience is going to engage with. Trust your partners to speak authentically to get the most interaction from potential customers.“At the end of the day, the creators and the influencers know best what their audience is going to respond and react to. This isn't their first time doing a partnership. They know what their audience is going to purchase, they know what their audience is going to be excited about. And we've had conversations with people where I've said to them, ‘Hey, we want to use this content that you've created on our pages, but I totally understand if it doesn't work out for your page.’ If it doesn't fit with your page and your audience, that's going to be weird. And that's how you lose your audience's trust is by posting things that you think, ‘My audience isn't going to like this.’ That's just how it is. And at the end of the day, the biggest thing obviously that we measure in this industry is your engagement rate, the realness of your audience. So if your audience isn't engaged, and you're posting constantly stuff that they don't care about, nobody's going to want to work with you.”11:31 – Approach influencers for specific needsNo single influencer can target your entire audience. Go to specific influencers so they can speak to specific audience types.“If you're this amazing graphic artist and you're like, ‘Oh, I have this cool thing I could do for the brand.’ And we want to work with you. I'm not going to say to you, ‘Okay, here's your link and your swipe app, post these Insta stories.’ Because that's not going to perform well. So I think a big thing of being a brand is you can't expect everything from everybody, and you can't expect every content creator that you work with to fulfill every single one of your needs. There are going to be people who will have different target markets, there are going to be people of different interests. You're not going to ask a fitness influencer to, I don't know, post a recipe. That would be a little bit weird. You would go to a food influencer for that. So I think it's just playing to people's strengths