#29 Jure Knehtl – Influencer Marketing, Scaling Up, and Going Glocal

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In this episode, Deividas and Jure catch up for the first time since Jure’s visit to Lithuania.

Jure, the CEO of WeScale and all-around expert in influencer marketing and eCommerce scaling, first reached out to Deividas in 2019 with some advice on scaling his business.

And now, he’s back to talk about all things influencer marketing, how he got his start, eCommerce scaling, and more.

When Jure first got his start in digital marketing, around 6 years ago, it was a completely different scene. Back then, he was just trying to learn digital marketing, spending up to $22 a day, and getting little to no mobile conversions (because sites weren’t even optimized for mobile back then!).

Now, Jure shares his experience with scaling up from $0 to $50 million in just under 4 years.

He talks about the process behind the secrets of his success: influencer marketing and localization.

Jure also explains his secret sauce for working with influencers – the content creation process, and how his approach to influencers’ content has changed since then.

He realized that in terms of content creation, if the influencers created the content themselves, the agency could start using it for ads.

He explains how he went all-in on user-generated content, and even decreased the budget for in-house production.

This move, as he found out, was well worth the ROI…

So, he started sending influencers the products and told them what kind of content they needed. Before, influencers didn’t want to start pushing the products to their followers. But now, Jure would start receiving 10-20+ pieces of content from each influencer. Content which he could use as high-quality ads.

Suddenly, he had gone from wanting to produce up to 100 pieces of content per month, to producing over 200+ high-quality and converting content instead.

Eventually, the content they received from influencers started performing much better than the in-house content they were using before.

After this, Jure starts to talk about the 2nd half of his success: localization.

Deividas agrees that, in theory, localization sounds like a lot of work.

Jure, meanwhile, explains how he was “forced” into localization.

Because he had started in Slovenia, he realized that there weren’t a lot of people in the country to begin with (only ~2 million)!

So, he quickly branched out to Croatia – as the payment methods were similar. From there, he translated all the landing pages, reached Germany, and that’s when he started scaling quickly…

Only to encounter even more issues in Germany.

People weren’t used to buying products via cash-on-delivery (COD) there and would return a lot of the products delivered. Jure learned that he had to handle unexpected challenges while scaling on the go.

Jure also discusses his experience with other sides of scaling up. Including outsourcing, logistics, localization, and going glocal – global with a local approach.

He also talks about putting out fires as an agency-owner, and how he’s had to react quickly when they’ve suddenly lost 40% of their sales in just 15 minutes.

Now, moving forward, he and Deividas talk about their goals for 2020: how their mentality and process changed, lessons learned, and what they hope to accomplish in the future.

PS – Looking for more info on influencer marketing? Check out our influencer marketing process to learn our approach, the exact processes we follow to contact 400+ influencers weekly down to the exact templates you can copy, how to scale up, and more. Check out the article for more info!

Here’s what we cover during episode #29:

Catching up
Influencer marketing
Jure talks growing from $0 to $50 million in just under 4 years, and his content creation process
How he broke the $1M/month barrier
How he hacked influencer marketing to scale up to 200+ different pieces of content per month
Why Jure increased the budget on user-generated content and influencers, and decreased it for in-house production
How Jure was “forced” into localization and what he learned branching out to different countries
Challenges of a new market + dealing with new and unexpected payment methods
Managing a growing team and new departments
Setting up product pages vs landing pages
What changed since then? How does Jure manage his agency now?
Deividas’ approach to growth-hacking and scaling
What is “glocal”? How do you go global with a local approach?
Putting out fires: Jure shares the horror story of how his agency got blocked in 5 out of 12 countries and how they lost 40% of their sales in 15 minutes
Core lessons learned from working in a super fast-paced environment
How Jure randomly met the CMO of eBay UK and how he finds quality people (including Deividas!)
Deividas’ approach to writing and how he got his start
Deividas on building teams and how he handles decision-making without getting too overwhelmed
What is the most challenging thing for Deividas right now?
Jure’s and Deividas’ goals for 2020
Jure’s relationship with money and personal-finances: investing in himself vs his business
If Jure had to give a TED talk on something outside his main area of expertise – what would it be?