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Hosted by:

Katya Allison

Director of Marketing
Content at GRIN

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GRIN Gets Real

About GRIN Gets Real

Welcome to the GRIN gets real podcast, the show for people who want to maximize their marketing potential. From influencer marketing to eCommerce strategy and everything in between, each episode will feature industry experts that share their insights and provide actionable tips to help you achieve your marketing goals. Subscribe and stay tuned!

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Get positive ROI working with creators

[audio src="https://grin.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/BTI_Podcast_Dreamland-Baby-QA_2022_Q1_03.mp3" /]

In this episode:

Tara Williams, a mom of four and the Founder and CEO of Dreamland Baby

Dreamland Baby, the maker of Weighted Sleep Sacks and Blankets featuring their proprietary CoverCalm™ Technology, has been leveraging creators as part of their marketing strategy. We will dive into how they continue to see month-over-month revenue growth in their program during our chat. Tara Williams, the CEO, will share her insights, provide practical learnings, and reveal how they continue to see influencer marketing success.

Full episode details

“Our influencer manager never, never, never struggles to find creators. It’s unlimited… You need GRIN if you can’t find them.” – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

Influencer marketing has been a white-hot growth strategy for the Dreamland Baby brand. It was an obvious marketing approach for founder and CEO, Tara Williams.  Any sleep-deprived parent who hears just one story of how the weighted sleep sack instantly solves a baby’s sleep problems is going to convert. The challenge is to get that story out to as many followers as possible. Because of this, Tara and her team have been working for a little over a year to scale their influencer marketing program as much and as effectively as they can. The brand is constantly testing new ideas, bringing new “look-alike” macro and micro influencers into their program, and growing their brand awareness and their bottom line to match and then exceed their goals.

“If you have the historic data on the points that you need to hit, you can be successful by dialing [in] exactly what you need to do to get to the number you want.” – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

Breakdown of the GRIN Gets Real Podcast + Brands Talking Influencers With Dreamland Baby

“For us, one full-time person can adequately bring in over a million dollars in revenue.” – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

Dreamland Baby has seen huge growth with their influencer marketing program in the last year, and are on track to meet and exceed this year’s goals as well. But running an influencer marketing program wasn’t so easy in the beginning. Staffing issues and running the program on spreadsheets made it difficult to track what was working, and Dreamland’s CEO, Tara Williams, almost gave up on the strategy. But then they hired an influencer marketing manager with experience running a similar program and upgraded to GRIN as their CRM, and the pieces began to fall into place. Now Dreamland is bringing in $100,000 a month in revenue from their influencer program alone, using a specific 40/60 mix of macro and micro influencers. They are quickly becoming a household name and delivering their sleep solution to hundreds of thousands of grateful families.

“I look back at when we first started our program with [GRIN] over a year ago, I would watch these firesides and think, ‘Oh, one day we could be there…’ and now to be on it, feels very full circle.” – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

In this episode of the GRIN Gets Real Podcast, Katya from GRIN follows up with Tara to get more answers to questions submitted during the Brands Talking Influencers Fireside Chat webinar, where Tara first introduced the Dreamland Baby’s influencer marketing program to the GRIN audience. Tara’s energy and passion for her company’s influencer marketing strategy and for their exhaustive use of the GRIN platform to manage it, has Katya exclaiming “I love it!” over and over again throughout the podcast.

Listen to hear Tara break down answers to questions like:

  • What she thinks of using agencies, and why a CRM like GRIN, in her opinion, is always a better option.
  • How her team pursues working with macro influencers, and what calculations they use when determining what to pay a higher-tiered influencer.
  • How her team uses audience reports and influencer credibility scores in tandem with human reasoning to determine which creators to pursue.
  • Her opinions on the pros and cons of working with macro versus micro influencers.
  • The logic and perspective behind requiring conversions before they offer commissions to influencers as ongoing partners… and how it’s not really about saving money.

“The best case scenario is if you can work with a macro influencer on a commission basis, I mean, that’s like the Holy Grail. However, almost nobody does that anymore.” – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

In addition to these specific explanations of how the Dreamland Baby company structures and manages their influencer program, you’ll get to hear a CEO’s perspective on influencer marketing, and what’s most important to the brand’s overall success. Tara shows her skillful leadership in the way she empowers her team to think outside the box and find new ways of driving ROI. Her stories of both success and failure, which she believes is necessary in order to learn and grow, are inspiring and fun to listen to.

“There really was no strategy before GRIN… It was like, every time, it was just a Hail Mary, we just hoped it would convert, but we had no data, we had no way to track data.” – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

For an insider look at one brand’s successful influencer marketing strategy; how they scaled quickly from spreadsheets to bringing in $100,000 in revenue, month over month, from their influencer program alone… Grab your airpods and listen to podcast now!

Quotes from This Episode

Podcast title image of "Living the cookieless life as marketers using creators"

“We’ll use all of the GRIN tools, but we also use human tools. So we are getting on their Instagram, we’re seeing how they engage with their audience. “ – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

“I would say to anybody who’s thinking about GRIN, give it at least three to four [months] before you start seeing a positive return. And then really, I would say six months before you’re kind of flying with it.” – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

“We were exclusively on Instagram, and now we’re going into TikTok and YouTube to really get a diversification of both video and static reels… Because people want to see all these different mediums.”  – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

“Anything that an agency is going to provide, which is suggestions, which is tools, which is monitoring, GRIN has it. So for anyone who’s considering an agency, I would say, absolutely not, just use GRIN.”  – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby.

“Oftentimes [an] email is enough for that person to say, “You know, I’m going to post again, I love it, we use it all the time. I just forgot about it or was busy with other stuff.” – Tara Williams, Dreamland Baby

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