Welcome to the new episode of Champions of Performance Marketing. I’m excited about this episode because we’re stepping slightly outside traditional media buying territory…
Our guest is Alexia Chirita, who works at Metapic, an influencer marketing platform that connects influencers with brands. Alexia also has vast experience working with Shopify stores and helping them grow. I really hope she will tell us more about how to make an e-commerce store grow and convert better, apart from traffic. So our discussion today is more about how influencer marketing compares to affiliate marketing, how performance is tracked, and how media buyers can use influencer marketing as an additional channel, or maybe even become creators themselves.
Let’s dive in!
This episode is part of the Champions of Performance Marketing series on the CPV Lab blog, where we talk to experienced practitioners across affiliate marketing, media buying, and performance advertising.
Listen to the episode on our Spotify channel
Q: Let’s start with your journey. How did you get into e-commerce and then influencer marketing?
Alexia Chirita: Take it as a girl with a technical background who went into e-commerce, and then I went into sales. I worked at a Shopify development agency where I migrated brands on Shopify, helped them grow, and did a lot of strategies with them, including the marketing part as well. Then I went into SaaS. I spent a year building and growing a product. And now I wanted to go a little bit back to my roots, back into more direct e-commerce.
I joined Metapic. It is an affiliate and influencer marketing company, which is something that I haven’t really done before. I haven’t recruited influencers, but I worked in that environment. I worked with people in that environment, more like on the sidelines of affiliate marketing. I thought, well, this is a very nice next step for me.
For me, I think it’s a very good fit. It combines both the human interaction with the business part of e-commerce, with actual technical aspects like attribution. I’m very excited. This is my first podcast in affiliate marketing.
Q: What surprised you most when you came into this field? How do creators actually drive sales?
Alexia Chirita: Well, I think they’re two very different worlds. Totally different worlds. One of them is very technical. You do the media buying part. You do sales. You have the attribution tool standard from Meta and from Google. Here, things are not that easy, because you deal with people. You don’t deal with the algorithms of Meta.
You cannot look at Google Analytics to see who is a better fit because there’s awareness, engagement, reach, buying intent, and the actual creators who engage with their audience.
You cannot put a finger on a sale and say, “Well, this is 100% from this.” It can’t be. And we have to do a lot of teaching. We have to teach marketing managers and influencer marketing managers how this mix contributes to the final sale. It’s a longer journey than a standard journey. And you just have to be very aware of how things work. Otherwise, you will be very upset with your results.
Q: What’s the real difference between affiliate marketing and influencer marketing?
Alexia Chirita: So, in my opinion and how I see it, affiliates are people who are not really putting themselves out there. They’re media buyers. They are blogs. They are websites. They might have their face out there, but it’s a bit of a different medium.
Compared to an influencer who does content all day long, who films their whole day, and who actively shows you how to use the product and shows you how they integrate it into their daily lives, I think it’s a bit of a different world, but they definitely are connected.
Influencers are affiliates, and affiliates are people who influence people.
From a technical standpoint, Metapic is very similar to an affiliate network.
But when it comes to the services that we provide, they’re very tailored. Each brand has its own manager who recruits influencers from our database or from outside it. So we are actively looking for people. This is what an affiliate manager at Awin does: they actively look for people and create opportunities.
But here it’s about people’s reputations. So it’s not just about links; it’s about the impact these people can have on your business.
And we kind of know after all these years how to pair creators with brands. We know when to tell brands to invest in flat fees to drive specific awareness for a new collection, for a new launch, or for a new concept that they have.
We know how to pick influencers to promote this exact part. And in the end, we track it and make sure everything goes on track. If it does not go on track, we can adjust everything on the spot.
Q: You have flat fees for influencers and then pay them on performance as well, so it’s a mix?
Alexia Chirita: It’s a mix. Whenever we talk about influencer marketing, it’s not just CPA that works as an affiliate.
In affiliate marketing, it is very easier to attribute a sale to a specific affiliate because we rely on last-click, last- view purchases and similar attribution methods.
And influencers don’t necessarily want to be paid in CPA, which makes sense because they do have their products, and they do use the products every day for a long period of time. You cannot really attribute 100% of the sale to an influencer because it’s a bit unfair, right?
So we do a mix of marketing. We do a mix of ways to pay the creator to make sure that the brand has enough awareness and everyone is happy.
CPA works, but we look more at cost per click, because clicks are very important. We can measure buying intent from a story or a reel by the clicks it generates. We do look over the sales, but it’s very bespoke for every brand that we work with. Some of them are less flexible, and some of them are more flexible. It really depends a lot on the brand and the product that we’re talking about.
Q: How does the matching process work? How do you pair the right influencer with the right brand?
Alexia Chirita: We’re very close to our influencers. So we know what they post. We know their activity. We know if they have pets, if they have children, and if they go to church, which is important.
What kind of products do they buy, and what jobs do they have? We need to know all these things because, let’s take a beauty brand, for example.
A beauty brand might be fit for young people, for elderly people, or for people with acne. And we need to find influencers. You cannot promote a product for acne to someone who has flawless skin. Nobody will believe that; nobody would buy that.
Let’s say, for example, we have a great creator that we had amazing experiences with, but they don’t have acne on their skin, which is, congrats, that’s fine. But they might know other creators who would like to work with us on that product. Or they have family members, a sister, a sister-in-law, a mother, or a daughter, who might have this problem.
And our job is to know that, so we can create a perfect experience for the brand selling the acne product, as well as for the influencer, because that trust is very important.
People who watch influencers can smell bullshit from six kilometers away. It’s very easy to see if someone just wants to promote something for the money or if they actually believe in the product.
Influencers have a responsibility to know if the product fits their audience, but some of them don’t. They just want the money. And it’s our responsibility to make sure that their audience will respond to the products that we want to promote and that they are a good fit.
Q: How can someone join your influencer list?
Alexia Chirita: We often do trials with influencers because our community needs to grow, and we want to bring more influencers, and we want brands to have visibility with new influencers. So we do tests.
Any influencer can apply to our platform (Metapic). We have a couple of criteria, for example, not having fake followers and having an engaged audience. And this we measure via some tools that we developed and have purchased.
We also make sure that the content is not all sponsored, because that’s not really natural. Those are just the user-generated content types of creators that we don’t necessarily work well with.
People can apply; they apply, we accept them, and then we start giving them one or two campaigns to start promoting the products.
For example, there are brands that we work with, like Sinsay, and everyone in Romania has at least one product from Sinsay at home: a mug, some pants, a jacket, or something for their children. It’s extremely popular for people with children because children grow fast and you don’t want to spend a lot of money on children’s clothes. Sinsay has very high-quality children’s clothes. And a lot of our influencers have children, and a lot of them already have these products at home. So it’s not a very hard exercise to make.
They apply, we teach them how to use the platform, and we see if they are a good fit. If they are, they can start posting. And we start seeing the results. Do they drive sales? Does the content that they make make sense for us and for their audience? And we can see that via numbers, but we can also see that via intent, like the engagement that they have.
Some people may find these to be vanity metrics, the reach, the engagement, because everyone wants good numbers, but they don’t measure anything. But we still look at those. We want the influencers to be out there, and we want them to make an impact, and we can also measure the impact that they have. We do the math.
Q: Reach is important, impressions are important, but at the end of the day brands are looking for sales, right? Do you use tracking links or coupons? How do you attribute those sales?
Alexia Chirita:
We have our own tool that does the links and the attribution, and we can monitor everything from our dashboard. The brands can also monitor everything from their dashboard. They have their own accounts. They can see the dashboard with all the results from all the influencers, from each story. They can download the stories, they can use them, and they can do whatever they want with them because it’s part of our contract.
But there is something to consider: some collaborations don’t necessarily have links. Some products may be launched in a physical shop. A brand may just launch an app, and we want to track the installs.
We can do a lot of things in a lot of directions when it comes to how we use the creator database we have and the needs of the brand.
For example, we drove people to a physical location when a brand opened, via influencers, and you can’t really track that. Because people just come, even if we put up forms. We went on the field and asked people, ‘How did you hear about the launch?’ And they said: ‘From this influencer, from that influencer, from Facebook… I was just here 10 minutes ago; I saw balloons, and I thought I should come.’
So there are things like that that you can see but cannot pin down to a single link.
Note: A physical store can track influencers via coupon codes/QR codes which can be easily tracked with a tracker like CPVLab.
Q: How do brands evaluate and approve influencers? What are they looking for?
Alexia Chirita: It depends on the type of collaboration that we have.
Some of the brands that we work with require specific influencers to start the collaboration with. They already know them; they’ve been following them for a while. They think it would be a great fit, so we facilitate the collaboration at that point.
Some brands don’t even require the approval of the influencers. They just want to see how it goes, and we can, if something does not go according to plan, just shut it down. This might happen very rarely, but it might happen. We have to keep an eye out for it.
For example, there is one case that we have with a brand that sells vacuums and hairdryers. They want to make sure that the content creators don’t promote their competitors. This is a very good thing because it doesn’t make sense for them as a brand to be associated with someone already promoting another brand. They’re also looking for people who stay at home a lot, take care of their house, take care of their appearance, and may use the product on a day-to-day basis.
If they have a cleaning lady that comes in, the house is always perfect, and they don’t show any kind of spillage or any kind of imperfections, it doesn’t make sense. That creator has already positioned themselves as ‘I am perfect. ‘ And coming in and bringing a vacuum cleaner and cleaning a dirty countertop does not fit the brand. So we are looking for things like that.
Q: Can an affiliate media buyer realistically become an influencer? If someone has always been behind ad accounts, how should they start from zero?
Alexia Chirita: They can. Anyone can become a content creator. Anyone can become an influencer, so don’t worry about that.
There are ways for you to become an influencer if that’s what you want. In my opinion, the best way to start is to know your niche. Find something that you’re an expert in, or become an expert in a certain area, and start doing content around that.
You don’t necessarily need to put your face out there. There are content creators like girls doing nails. They don’t necessarily have to be experts. They don’t have to have courses. They can just do their own nails at home, as I do. But I just have to show how I’m doing the process. I don’t necessarily have to show my face. And in that way, nail companies and other beauty brands, like hand creams, will see that I am doing good content around that. And they will start sending me products. They will start giving me the opportunity for performance campaigns and earning money via clicks and links. And this happens in different ways, in different contexts.
If I don’t want to show my face at all, I can just start writing a newsletter. I can just become an expert in fashion tips. I can just do that or create a Substack. Influencers don’t necessarily need to show their face. They need to show that they are good at something. Showing your face helps a lot.
Q: Do you think that affiliates can use AI avatars instead of showing their face? Because now we have all this AI stuff that surrounds us.
Alexia Chirita: I think this is a very trendy question in the influencer area. And I think it’s really hard to give a response because it depends on the brand, the person, and how it’s done.
For example, I know Samsung is doing that. They work with virtual AI influencers in the States and in China, and that works because it’s a different market. They have a reputation; they have a name.
Imagine a beauty brand selling acne products using AI avatars. This will never, never work. Imagine, I have seen such flawless skin. Look, I had acne two weeks ago, and now it’s gone.
So it depends on what you want to influence. I see brands selling clothes that use AI-generated pictures of people wearing the products in real life. And it annoys me so much. I get that brands want to take shortcuts, but this is not the way to go for a fashion brand. People are not models. In my opinion, it makes the brand seem a little bit like they don’t care about this part.
However, if I see Samsung doing AI avatars with a fridge or with a phone, I’m not going to get upset. I understand that anyone can use a phone. I don’t need to see myself wearing the phone. I don’t need to see myself opening the fridge.
There are a lot of content creators who do this well and who know their market. They don’t show dresses; however, they show vacations. They are putting the AI avatar out on vacation, going on elephant rides, and whatever. I don’t endorse that behavior, like the riding of elephants, but you can promote travel services with AI avatars. You can promote a fridge. You can promote a car. I think you need to know your niche.
Q: In what niches are brands actively looking for influencers right now?
Alexia Chirita: Generally, products that are easy to buy without having another decision maker. Beauty products, you just see a new mascara and you think, “I like it; my mascara is almost gone. I’m going to buy a new mascara right now.”
For example, when it comes to fashion, you might think, “Wow, I see there are sales; let me check them out, and I will place an order right now.” It’s more about impulse buying. It’s a different behavior.
You have to influence the decision quickly when it comes to influencers, as they often need to create a sense of urgency or excitement that prompts immediate action from potential buyers.
And the people can be in different stages, like considering the brand, but the final purchase moment needs to be like a sale, or showing a product, or demonstrating myself wearing a product somewhere outside.
It’s not going to be as easy as buying a car, because buying a car requires, first of all, the spouses. I’m not going to buy it myself; I’m going to talk with my partner. It’s a big investment, and you won’t even be able to attribute this sale to a certain influencer.
Another vertical that is very hard to do is furniture, as you need to measure the space, review your layout, consult with someone else, and possibly discard your existing couch. You cannot just buy a couch right now. However, it works with decorative items, vases, candles, kitchen utensils, and things that are easier to purchase and are not such a big strain.
So we’re looking more like impulse purchases.
Q: Do influencers have to buy the products themselves, or do brands provide them?
Alexia Chirita: It depends. But the best way to go about this is to show products in real life. If I want to sell utensils for the kitchen, ideally, I should make an omelet with those utensils or a cake or whatever. I cannot just show how pretty they are and expect people to trust me that they are pretty and that they are working. They need to see it in action.
Brands give influencers vouchers to buy products from their assortment that fit their lifestyle and their house and look good in the images they create. However, people might already have the products in their home, as I mentioned with Sinsay. This is a really good success for us, that campaign, because the influencers have the product. They do receive vouchers and buy more products, but there is a bit more content that can be made with the products that you already have. The vouchers, for example, can be sent for new products, new collections, or new brands that might come to the country or to a shop. A combination.
Q: And what platforms currently convert best for influencers? Instagram, TikTok, what do you see working most?
Alexia Chirita: Instagram all the way. Because I’m going to paint a picture here, when you are scrolling on TikTok, you don’t necessarily feel like thinking too much, right?
You’re scrolling on TikTok a bit mindlessly. You just want to take the edge off. You had a very long day. You just want entertainment.
However, when you’re scrolling on Instagram, you already have that behavior in your mind that this is where you can find products, and this is where advertisements are always present. And it’s a different journey than TikTok.
YouTube also works, but on YouTube, you’re not necessarily making impulse purchases. You’re making decisions.
You see videos with people reviewing the products, and you think, “Well, I think I’m going to take that surfboard because I researched it, and it’s going to be very expensive.” It’s more about learning. You go there to learn stuff, and you have a different mindset.
But there is a bit of a difference for the region. In the UK, TikTok Shop works very well because, for a couple of years now, they have been creating that behavior locally, allowing you to purchase products on TikTok. There is this brand, Wonderskin, that sells beauty products and lip tints, and it’s a viral product that I think they were the pioneers of. They sell one lip tint every 1.2 seconds on TikTok Shop.
In the Northern countries, Snapchat is very popular, and a lot of creators are sharing links, products, and everything on Snapchat because this is one of the few regions in the world where Snapchat lets you monetize the content you make. People have become accustomed to using Snapchat. The behavior here is very different. And a lot of creators have Snapchat communities;
In Romania, TikTok works very well with influencers by using flat fees. Not necessarily links, not necessarily performance. This is a channel that brands use in Romania and in Eastern Europe because you cannot monetize the TikTok content. What content creators do is monetize their content through flat-fee campaigns.
Q: Do brands agree with flat fee campaigns? They’re paying without guaranteed results…
Alexia Chirita: It depends a lot on the market. In Romania, it’s a bit of a challenge to promote the performance aspect within the influencer network. So we work with people who actually know how to do performance marketing, and they know how to do the links and how to promote. It’s a hybrid model.
The flat fees are very good for bringing in new creators and giving them the products, and making them show the products online, and then the performance part comes.
When they already have the product, their database of people, like their followers, already know that they have this specific product, and they know they have a campaign, and they start doing performance as well. This is where it’s hybrid.
For some periods, it works best to have flat fee campaigns; after that, performance works very well. So you need to find the balance between the two, and also gift vouchers to the influencers.
Q: How do you select micro vs. macro influencers, and how important is follower count really?
Alexia Chirita: The influencers with big followers don’t necessarily convert. It’s only about awareness.
The engagement for brands with over 500,000 followers is 2% maximum. Around 1.2, 1.6. These types of creators are not influencers anymore. They’re starting to become public figures. They get invited to certain events. They start posting a different kind of lifestyle than what normal people have. And they’re not necessarily credible. ‘I really trust this person who uses this product for acne, and I’m not going to do peelings and similar treatments to work on the problem.’ It’s a different type of content that they promote versus small influencers.
Micro-influencers are what we consider to have between 10 and 50,000 followers, and this is the holy grail of where performance happens. And these are the people who have the highest conversion rates and the highest engagement. The engagement for people with under 50,000 followers can go up to 20%. People can actually be that engaged because it’s a smaller community and these people are not public figures. They still are, you know, a girl with a phone in her bedroom doing content and showing products and going and being a human being that is relatable.
Oftentimes, big creators like macro influencers and public figures won’t accept any kind of performance campaigns because they don’t need them. They don’t want to have a long-lasting relationship with a brand that may or may not generate money for them. So they’re looking for what can be the money they can make and the things that they can do. There is a point when you want more creative freedom. When being a public figure, you want to do whatever you want with the products that you receive and the campaigns that you are getting paid to do. And so, as a public figure, you can do most of it, whatever you want. They’re looking for this creative freedom, which small influencers do not always have.
We let our influencers do whatever they want. We want the content to be as natural as possible. And this is what I always say. If there is an affiliate that does not necessarily resonate with the products that are being presented, just don’t promote them. You can have your license suspended for drunk driving, but you should not accept a collaboration with BMW, right?
Q: And for CPA promotions, what content formats bring the most revenue from what you’ve seen with your influencers?
Alexia Chirita: Stories. So stories are stories on Instagram. They work best because it’s right here, right now. I’m showing you what I’m wearing in this moment. You can buy it right now if you like it, or you can go check it out a little bit more.
Stories are the holy grail of making money out of Instagram.
Reels also work, but for promoting new products, new collections, and similar launches. A lot of influencers have communities on Facebook and on Substack, which is becoming more popular, and people can join those communities to write more content. This is for people who like to write and have this talent, and they can share tutorials, like how to create your own capsule wardrobe by buying five tops and three pants and just combining everything. And this is the type of content that stays for a long time and doesn’t get erased.
Communities are also built on Facebook. A lot of influencers have communities on Facebook where they put links to the products that they like and the products that they have. But you need to be very engaged to build that kind of community and actually get links, clicks, and conversions.
My advice, if you’re an affiliate trying to break into the influencer world, is just to start being a person that you can trust with the purchase. Use the product, show how to use the product, and use it every day. And you will make money out of those collaborations and other people will come in with similar products that fit your lifestyle for you to promote.
Q: How do influencers scale? If you’re promoting one brand, what can you do next to grow?
Alexia Chirita: Well, first of all, do things without being paid.
Go and try out new products for yourself without being a paid partnership. Go to Sephora, buy every foundation on the rack, and spend 30 days wearing one foundation a day during your day to show the results before and after. This is something that someone has done on TikTok. And then, after those 30 days, I think 80% of the brands wanted to collaborate with her further.
Do things without being paid. Do things without any expectation from the brands. Do this for yourself. Do this to become more of an authority in the field in which you want to promote things.
For example, if you are the type of content creator who shares tips on decorating your house, go into every decorator store in your city and show the products without any sponsorship. Just go there and share what you like, what you didn’t like, and what works best for a certain type of aesthetic and for another type of aesthetic, and get out there. And after that, brands will come.
You have to be a consumer, and you have to show people, you have to influence their opinions, and you have to be present. Because if everything is sponsored, you’re not going to trust it anymore.
Buy clothes and test them to see how they look. Look over the ingredient list and the composition of the clothes. And make a video about, for example, how Zara for men has very good compositions, and everything is made out of cotton, but with women, everything is made of polyester. And after that, brands selling products with cotton will reach out to you and say, ‘Hey, we actually have products with cotton for women.’
Q: What about navigating politically sensitive periods as an influencer?
Alexia Chirita: It’s very hard for an influencer to navigate these periods because the people that you have in your audience have different political views on the subject matter. People do have the expectation from influencers to share a political view or to share things about politics. But this is not necessarily the type of thing that I would recommend. And I think I wanted to touch a little bit on what to do and what not to do when you are an influencer.
You have to use your platform for good. Make sure to be very well informed before doing things like that. Because I have seen a lot of influencers being paid by political parties or by associations to say certain things that they did not think through. And after that, they realized, ‘I made a mistake. Let me try to correct that. ‘
It’s very important to stand your ground and not to listen to everything that comes to your inbox. You can say no. And if you start saying yes to things that don’t resonate with you, then your audience is going to smell that, and they will start fading away.
Q: What should an e-commerce store fix before sending influencer traffic to their website?
Alexia Chirita: Fix your website.
Imagine that you have very good influencers and you have very good products. And then people go on your website, and it’s very bad. The prices are not translated into the local currency. The content is not translated into the local language. The site looks a little bit shady. You have problems with the delivery. You have problems with sizing. You have to fix all these things and try to be as proactive in fixing these things as they appear.
People who buy based on influencer recommendations will have a stronger relationship with the brand than those who find the product themselves. It’s like I’m recommending something to a friend and they hate it. I feel responsible for that. I said, “Well, I recommended that product to you. I’m very sorry that your expectations did not meet the reality.“
You need your website to be as optimized as possible. Run experiments, do heat map analysis, make sure that the content is optimized, and make sure that things look correct in the language that you’re presenting.”
I’ve seen this a lot of times. Right now, I have a brand coming in from Germany to promote a clothing product in Romania. Everything looks very nice, and the products are really great, but the currency is in euros. The website is in German, and the translations are made with an auto-translate tool that makes everything sound like it’s obviously translated with Google Translate, and it’s very bad.
We said, “You have to fix these things first.” Otherwise you’re going to burn your money with influencers and you’re going to blame us. We didn’t bring good influencers. We didn’t bring good traffic. We selected them badly. And this is our responsibility to make sure that the brands are set for success because if we accept the money and we accept the collaboration with someone that has a leaky bucket of a website, our reputation will be jeopardized. The influencers will receive backlash. You need to make sure that this part is optimized.
It’s also very important to know your audience. If you come here to us and say, ‘My products are very good for teenagers,‘ and we start bringing in younger influencers, but then we realize that nobody’s buying it. The brand is going to get frustrated that we don’t deliver results, when in fact, that particular brand has a different audience. Maybe their audience is mature women going to work and going to certain clubs, whatever. It’s going to be very different from how you promote products for younger generations.
If you come to us to conduct the experiment, it will be very costly. We can do that. We could accept that, but it’s going to be very expensive for you. We want brands to succeed, and this would not make them generally succeed.
Q: What should brands expect in the first one to two months of working with influencers?
Alexia Chirita: It depends a lot on how big the brand is in the country. If it is a well-known brand, like Sephora, for example, everyone will know Sephora. Every influencer will have products. We can start very easily by doing performance campaigns, recruiting influencers, and just saying, ‘Hey, we just started this collaboration. You can start putting your links out there.’ Create links, show products, and you can just start a collaboration as it is.
However, if it’s a product or a brand that has never been in the country before, you will need to create awareness. And we do that with flat fees at first.
Brands come in; they want to see a couple of influencers getting the product, doing hauls, and showing how they work. And then we can start with the performance part, because otherwise, people are not going to trust the influencers promoting those products.
You need to create that relationship with the influencer and create a relationship with their audience. And we will find people, and we will experiment with influencers around our community. If they want more like those, we can always find more.
Results after starting a campaign with influencers come in like three months.
Q: What metrics should brands watch beyond just sales?
Alexia Chirita: We look over traffic, what traffic we bring to the website, and we use the traffic metric to identify, for example, if a certain brand did not receive sales on the spot, but people went to physical shops to buy the products.
We measure their interest. But different business models and different brands will require different metrics to look over.
If you’re only an e-commerce shop, then you will see the traffic, and you will see the sales, and you will just calculate the conversion rates.
The engagement, the reach, the vanity metrics, the people who have seen a post or a certain story, the clicks they make, and the sales that are generated afterwards.
This is the engagement with the stories.
For example, an influencer may post multiple stories with products from a certain brand. And we want to measure the rate that people stay from the post saying, ‘I’m going to show you the products that I bought,‘ until the last story where they say, ‘I hope you like them; here are the links.‘ And we want to make sure that the user stays for that sequence as much as possible. And if they don’t stay, they can adapt the content. Maybe the products they have are not a good fit. Maybe the way they present is not very good.
Q: When I was looking into influencer marketing a few years back, there were a lot of influencers who didn’t want to be paid on performance. They wanted a flat fee, and that’s it. Do you see influencer marketing moving closer to affiliate marketing in terms of tracking and accountability?
Alexia Chirita: It depends a lot on the market that we’re talking about, because some markets may be a little bit more mature versus some that still need a little bit of handholding on the subject. Content creators in the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany were the first to start shifting towards a more performance-oriented approach.
This gives us hope for markets that are not yet there, such as Eastern Europe, Italy, or Spain, where more consideration and awareness are needed, as we must train the brands.
There are two types of training that we need to do. We have to train brands to see the value in long-term performance campaigns and to have the patience to wait for results, because it takes at least three months, sometimes even longer.
It’s not like you’re losing money in the first three months. You’re just not going to see the account at its full potential. You’re still going to see numbers that you can say, ‘it’s not bad, but we want better.’ Brands need to have that patience.
Additionally, we must train influencers to recognize that this is a long-term partnership and a consistent source of revenue for them. They have to have the patience to have a long-term collaboration with the brand before it will work amazingly.
There are some markers from the beginning that will show us if a collaboration will work or not. One of them is the influencer’s willingness to adapt and re-engage with us, and to actually pursue a collaboration.
It’s very important to work with people who have the same goals as you, who want long-term collaborations, who want to be part of your community, and who are actually there to put in the work. Because what happens if you don’t have flat-fee campaigns anymore? Are you just going to stop being an influencer? Are you going to go back to a corporate job? Each to their own.
Q: Where do you see influencer marketing heading with all this AI content and creators?
Alexia Chirita: A lot of influencers use AI. They use AI to find topics to present further. They use AI to come up with scripts. They use AI to search for brands that they can buy to test. They are using AI more and more often.
But as I mentioned, it’s very tricky to see who can actually benefit from AI avatars and fully AI-generated content. It depends a lot on the type of brands that they work with and who they do this with.
I now remember there is this guy who is doing Instagram reels 100% using AI. He’s actually an AI engineer. He uses this channel to experiment with AI tools and show what they can do. He puts himself in different places, in different locations, like at the bottom of the sea or on the moon, just to show the AI’s capabilities.
He does this with brands, and it’s very fun to watch if you don’t take into account the water that is being consumed and the whatnot of doing the AI-generated videos.
There are certain brands that are very excited to work with him on this type of thing, but not necessarily sustainable brands. Just imagine the turtle association collaborating with someone doing AI videos of him taking care of turtles.
Q: What is one piece of advice, your top advice, you give a media buyer who wants to test influencer marketing today?
Alexia Chirita: Take your strengths and transform them into a bit more content. Get out of your comfort zone, but still be true to yourself and do things that you like, that you enjoy. People will know if what you’re doing is being done only for the clout or only for the money. It’s very easy to see how genuine someone is, especially when you see them talking, when you see them engaging with you.
Start experimenting; try out new things. Maybe you will find out that this type of influencer approach works best for you and is a very good addition to the channel that you already have created behind the screen.
Be bold, try new stuff, experiment, get out there and don’t be afraid of people’s opinions, because this is the number one thing that keeps people off from starting to do content creation and become an influencer.
What will my neighbor say about when I was a child? What will my high school colleagues say about my content? Just what does it matter? Ignore them; push these thoughts aside, because when you are successful, people won’t remember how they judged you for creating content at the beginning. People are very hard on themselves. We deserve good things in life if we put in the work.
Just try it and have patience. Money will follow, but you need to have other desires and other objectives in life than money to become an influencer. You have to be comfortable talking to people. You have to find joy in getting out there, talking to people, and being in front of the camera. Otherwise, it’s going to be another chore like washing the dishes. And who likes washing dishes?
Q: Where can people find you and get in touch?
Alexia Chirita: Find me on LinkedIn. I post there quite often, and I’m not afraid of people from high school seeing my content. I would say Instagram, too; however, I have just not started my influencer career yet. You can be there first when I decide to do that. And I will keep you updated with my journey if it ever comes into realization.
- Connect with Alexia Chirita on LinkedIn
- Connect with Alexia Chirita on Instagram
- Check Metapic influencer agency
Conclusion
So here’s what stood out from my conversation with Alexia…
The gap between influencer marketing and affiliate marketing is smaller than it looks from the outside. The tracking is similar; the matching process resembles what a good affiliate manager does; and performance campaigns are increasingly replacing flat-fee deals, at least in the more mature markets.
The main difference is that you’re working with people’s identities and reputations, not just links. And that changes everything about how you approach it, as it requires a more authentic and transparent strategy to build trust with the audience.
The trust element was the biggest takeaway for me. Audiences know immediately when someone is promoting something they don’t actually use or believe in.
And micro-influencer finding, identifying influencers with smaller but highly engaged audiences, is something I think many brands still get wrong. Spending big money on someone with 1 million followers for a 1.5% engagement rate is less effective than investing in someone with 30,000 followers who can achieve 15-20% engagement and actually drive sales. Quality over quantity, every time.
I would be curious to see how many affiliates will start doing influencer marketing after learning all this, just to explore their creativity and see if that could be an additional channel. And maybe if you are a naturally talkative person like Alexia, you’ll get into influencer marketing much easier.
Big thanks to Alexia for helping us better understand how influencer marketing actually works behind the scenes. And who knows, maybe somebody is moving from paid ads or adding an additional acquisition channel to their stack, right?
Here’s what to take away:
→ Influencer marketing and affiliate marketing are converging, especially in the UK, Netherlands, and Germany
→ Micro-influencers (10k-50k followers) deliver the highest engagement and conversion rates, up to 20% engagement
→ Macro influencers (500k+) average 1-2% engagement and mostly serve awareness purposes
→ Instagram Stories are the top format for driving sales, right here, right now, impulse behavior
→ Best verticals: beauty, fashion, home decor, anything with impulse purchasing behavior
→ Flat fee + performance is the standard hybrid model. Flat fees build awareness, then performance kicks in
→ Results take at least 3 months. Brands that expect instant ROI will be disappointed
→ Fix your website, localize your content, and know your audience before sending influencer traffic
→ Authenticity is non-negotiable. Audiences will know immediately if someone is faking it
→ AI avatars work for tech and travel; they don’t work for health, beauty, or anything requiring personal credibility
Whether you’re a brand considering adding influencer marketing to your mix or an affiliate wondering if there’s an additional channel you haven’t explored yet, this conversation with Alexia is a good starting point.
Want to watch the full conversation? Check out the complete interview on our YouTube channel and don’t miss the other episodes of the Champions of Performance Marketing series, where we sit down with experienced practitioners in affiliate marketing, media buying, and performance advertising. Browse all episodes on the CPV Lab blog.
And if you’re already tracking your affiliate campaigns and want to bring the same level of data visibility to influencer traffic, CPV Lab and CPV One give you the tracking infrastructure to monitor every click, conversion, and revenue stream across all your channels.
Try CPV Lab for FREE with our 14-Day Free Trial!
Author: Julia Draghici
Julia is the CEO of CPV Lab and CPV One ad trackers. She has 15+ years experience in the software industry, from development to management. For more than 7 years she is helping marketers get the best out of their marketing campaigns by using a performant ad tracker. Passionate about entrepreneurship, business and performance marketing, Julia loves helping people!
