What if I told you that you didn’t need to use influencers to grow your brand? At least not the way we often think of influencers. Imagine you could get people to endorse and post about your brand online without spending a dime and without giving away product?
Sam Malone has figured out how to do that. He is the founder and CEO of Guru Club. It started out as an exclusive, invite only influencer marketing network. A marketplace of sorts. But Sam and his team quickly figured out that traditional celebrity and celebrity wanna be influencers were both riddled with fraudulent followers, but also over-saturated with brand deals.
What Guru Club’s customers really wanted were actual customers posting about them to spark word of mouth about the brand.
So Sam and Guru Club pivoted. 
Now the app tells people who are already buying your product that if they post an Instagram story and tag your brand, they’ll get a rebate of sorts -- an instant refund of a portion of their purchase price. 
Let that sink in. You already have their money. You offer a 10 or 20 percent refund or rebate if they tag you in an Instagram story. Their friends and followers see they’ve purchased your product in a snackable medium that is highly engaging and relevant. You get exposure and third party validation without having to pay for it. Guru Club make sure the person is real, their engagement is real, the story stays live for 24 hours and then a rebate is triggered and returned to the person’s credit card. 
You’ve made money, earned third party endorsement of your product to the customer’s friends, sparking word of mouth for your brand, the customer is happy they feel valued and given an extra financial break for simply sharing about their purchase. Oh … and you get the customer’s social connection to see if you might have a real influencer with a large audience on your hands. 
Guru Club is currently only available as a Shopify add-on, but is coming soon to non-Shopify customers with a new feature Sam actually announces during the interview for the first time. We sat down last week -- literally … he came by my office -- to chat about Guru Club and what being an influence marketer without the need for influencers in the traditional sense, looks like. 
By way of disclosure, after our conversation, I was asked to serve on an advisory board for Guru Club. I gladly accepted. So I have some modest formal involvement with the company. But I didn’t know that when we talked, so I think the conversation is still very relevant. And I think you’ll agree, this is a clever approach to spreading the word about your brand in an efficient way.
This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.
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