Run the influencer playbook, one constraint at a time

1. Why group businesses into playbooks

Over the years, a great many businesses have been watched, and the stacks are offered as what has been observed in them:

• People behave in patterns. Those who come in typically arrive with much the same skills and much the same temperament.
• The platform says something about the person. Someone strong on Instagram typically has a somewhat different personality from a strong YouTuber, and both differ from the big live streamers. Of course some people learn to do all of it. But those drawn to one platform or another tend to differ in their psychological profiles (their "psychographs").
• Similar people get stuck in similar places. Because they come at problems in like ways, they typically end up with like problems, held back by the same things.

The playbooks that follow are among the more common ones, and they represent, it is thought, many of the owners this covers, painted with broad brushstrokes. The closing rule, further down, says what still decides the work.

2. Who this stack is for

The stack is for the business whose primary means of getting customers is organic content. If that is you, what follows is, it is thought, really important to understand.

3. The picture: how little of the audience reaches the money

These figures were set up only for the illustration. The revenue does not really matter, it is said; take it, with the follower count you are asked to imagine, as a stand-in for wherever you are now.

What	The figure offered
Revenue now	$1 million a year
Followers producing it	100,000
Share who see a normal post	Let's say, something like 1 to 2 percent
Share when a post makes a call to action	More like 0.1 percent, a small dot inside the rest

So the business is, at present, turning one to two percent of its audience into money.

4. Ads and a sales team reach further into the same audience

Why ads can add so much. There is typically a huge amount to gain when a business built on organic content starts running ads. The reason given: paid ads let you reach far more of the audience you already have, so you reach down past the one or two percent and earn from a larger slice of it. That is not necessarily a bigger audience. It is the same audience, reached in a higher share and more steadily.

A sales team does the same job. It converts a larger share of that audience.

Neither really expands capacity. The reason given is that most influencers who add ads run direct-response ads, not branding or value-based ads. Run the latter and you could actually make the pie bigger. Direct response is called fine: the free content sits at the top of the funnel, letting people know you exist and giving them value, and the ads and the sales team then gather people back up from it. Advertising led by the brand is the subject of SOP 177 — Go brand-first, read blended return and cost a permanent customer.

Each lever pulls once. Either lever gives an instant 2x, 3x or 5x. That sometimes can matter a great deal, and this is not to downplay it: for a business, the jump can be very large. Still, a pulled lever stays pulled, and nothing more comes from it. You go back to asking what the constraint is.

Then widen the base. In a business like this, the aim is to widen the pyramid: ideally, the same 1 to 2 percent, or whatever share your ads reach, now takes in even more people.

5. Many roads: ads are the easier pull

Suppose an influencer asks how to grow the business. There are a number of answers, and the picture used is many roads to one place, many paths up the mountain; weighing those paths is set out on SOP 186 — Pick the path up the mountain that fits your skills.

One path is simply paid advertising, which you could just start; do that and you would probably earn more. Running paid ads is called far easier than making content. If that is news to you, the view given is that it is only because you do not know which buttons to click, and learning that takes about an afternoon. It is not really hard to learn. Making good content is much harder.

6. Put a call to action on your best posts

The next move: take the content that has done best for you and add a call to action at its end.

• Pick the posts. Literally, your top 10 of the year: the pieces that performed best, leaving out meme material and keeping the pieces aimed at your avatar, the people you most want to serve.
• Add the ask. The example offered, for someone who posts about business and making money, goes roughly like this: by the way, there are seven more pieces in the same vein, and they are yours free if you opt in here, with a visual of what is on offer; and for the right fit, an invitation to book a call. Where the business sells by straight checkout instead, the ask can be that the whole complete thing is on the next page.

Turning one post that drew inquiries into a paid ad is SOP 38 — Turn the best organic post into an ad; the pick there is a single piece chosen by the inquiries it produced, where here it is ten chosen by performance and fit with your avatar. How a hook, a body and a call to action are put together is on SOP 119 — Assemble hook, meat and call to action.

7. More content or better content

Ads are one lever and a sales team another. Widening the triangle is where the choice between more content and better content comes in.

One practice here. Start with more, always; then, typically, once enough of it is done, the work folds back like an accordion.

The example. One creator posts one YouTube video a week. Sooner or later he bets he could get to about three a week, and he does. Then, looking back over the last month or two, he sees that 80 percent of his views came from three videos over the last 12 weeks. So he bets that spending more time making each video better would get even more out of them, and pulls back. He learns what makes a video good, then asks whether he can do that again and again, and do more of them. That swing between better and more comes naturally with content.

No right answer. The view here is that there is none. But typically, if progress has stalled for some time, you need to settle on one or the other, and if a lean is needed, the lean here is typically toward more.

The same back-and-forth, told with a different example, is on SOP 187 — Exhaust more before anything else, section 3; that page also starts with more when you are unsure, and flags a second view that quality and volume can be aimed at together. The three growth moves are on SOP 40 — Choose the next growth move, which ties their order, as an observation, to the size of the business's annual profit.

8. Where to send the traffic

This part is for anyone who tends to monetize an audience on YouTube, Instagram or even TikTok.

• Point almost all of it at Instagram. For a lot of companies, what has been found here to work remarkably well is sending almost all their traffic to Instagram. A YouTube audience could, of course, be sent straight to a checkout or a link, and that is fine. Asking people to send a direct message on Instagram is another route.
• TikTok and price. Earning from TikTok on anything expensive has been notoriously hard. Its shop and low-ticket consumer products tend to do really well there. Anything in the thousands, or sold business to business, has a much harder time.
• What has worked there. The only people seen to succeed with it put a call to action on TikTok telling viewers to message them on Instagram, where a direct-message funnel waits.

9. The direct-message funnel

How it runs. A post's call to action asks viewers to comment a keyword, send it in a direct message, or the like. A direct-message automation tool then fires and sends each of them the thing offered; they reply yes, and it sends the link.

What it builds. Run this way, it grows a whole second list, and it moves people from views to leads and from leads to conversations. The reason given: the sale is made inside the conversation.

10. The stack, put together

For an influencer, provided there is no supply constraint, the stack runs:

• Ads or a sales team: choose one.
• More content or better content: again, choose one.
• A call to action, added as well in the view here, with the direct-message automation as the mechanism behind it.

Doing that in an influencer business can grow the company right away. When the constraint is supply rather than demand, SOP 200 — Treat a supply constraint as demand for talent takes it up.

10.1 When the content is the founder's own

Grow the founder before hiring copies. If the business runs on the founder's own content, one practice here is to grow that output before hiring other creators to copy it. Doubling an audience you already have is judged probably more likely to work than starting a new creator from zero, because media gives unlimited leverage; leaning on one person is acceptable for now.

If you mean to sell the business. It will then have to run on cold paid ads rather than on the founder's personal following, so build that engine on purpose. Expect to spend some money getting better at the ads and at reaching new leads fast, which is SOP 90 — Reach a new lead fast. A company built on one person's face is worth less when sold: SOP 123 — Run the standing proof streams, section 1.

11. One constraint at a time

Stacks or no stacks, every business has one constraint, and the work is to solve it by reverse-engineering from it.

Start where the constraint is. If a business's issue is that it needs to price better, it starts there, with price, and moves on as it works through it.

The influencer case. Say the constraint of the influencer business above is that it has to convert a larger share of its audience: it simply has to sell more. Can it do more? It could add content, which would work; it could add ads, which would also work; it could add sales, and that works as well. All of them work, which is why there are several paths up the mountain, and every one of them still attacks the main issue.

That issue appears first one way, then another, in quick succession. First, as needing more leads so as to make more sales. Then, as a conversion issue: the leads are there, and too few of them convert. Each of the three moves pushes on that conversion step, so you can come at it from several angles, and that is fine. The constraint stays the same.

Then it moves. Once you have hit it from all three angles, you eventually reach a point where there are no more leads to be had. Then the need is to make "more better content", and that is now the constraint. It will move. Do a good job and yours moves regularly; do a bad job and you keep the same one for years. There are many ways to solve it, but what matters is identifying them correctly.

Why there is only ever one constraint, and the questions that find it, are on SOP 184. Putting the business's resources behind it is SOP 185 — Allocate resources to the constraint and use leverage.

12. What this page does not decide for you

• Whether the ten posts that get a call to action run as paid ads or as posts. The step follows straight on from the point that ads are easier than content. Not established on this page.
• The window behind the 80 percent. The look-back covers the last month or two, and the three videos are placed in the last 12 weeks. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• Leads or conversion. The main issue in the influencer case is first more leads, then a conversion problem with the leads already in hand. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• "More better content." Whether the next constraint is more content, better content or both. Not established on this page.
• Which business the price example means. It is pointed at, not named. Not established on this page.

13. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Check the stack fits: organic content is your primary way of getting customers, and supply is not your constraint
2	Pick one: ads or a sales team, to reach further into the audience you have
3	Pick one: more content or better content; if you must lean, the practice here is more first
4	Put a call to action on your best posts of the year, the ones aimed at your avatar
5	If your audience is on YouTube, or on TikTok and what you sell is expensive, the pattern given sends it to Instagram direct messages
6	Run a direct-message funnel: a keyword comment, an automated reply, a link, a conversation
7	Once a lever is pulled, go back to the constraint
8	Keep to one constraint at a time, and expect it to move
9	If the content is the founder's, grow the founder first; if you mean to sell, build a paid-ads engine

14. What this page does not cover

Brand advertising, the home-service stack and the B2B services and software stack are not covered on this page.