In the first mini episode of the Julius Profiles podcast, Danny spoke to Stephen Elliott, a content marketer at Julius. Stephen gave us his unique perspective on influencer marketing, as one of the people marketing the practice.

Takeaways from this episode include:

• The drive for engaging content on social media
• Reddit as a hub for authentic digital communities
• The necessity for nuance in digital marketing

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About our guest:

Stephen Elliott is a three-year veteran at Julius, having started out as an analyst on the research team. Though his background is in law and journalism, having graduated with a degree in political science and economics, Stephen found his way to marketing when he felt he needed a change in scenery. Now, he creates content for all of Julius’ social channels, including blogs, ebooks, videos, and even our podcast. He leverages his unique perspective as a marketer to inform his content production.

Key episode insights:

The drive for engaging content on social media

When asked about the near future of influencer marketing, Stephen pointed to several trends that would suggest social media as a whole is moving towards more engaging content.

“People are finding ways to interact with one another on a deeper level in a way that's actually authentically engaging and not just mindless content to consume. It's content you actually want to engage with and people you actually want to talk to. It's community building more than it is just content creation.”

He remarked that influencer marketing is evolving in tandem with social media, with the goal being to get people to engage with and return to a piece of content.

Reddit as a hub for authentic digital communities

Stephen is a self-described Redditor who enjoys diving into the diverse and often strange communities on the social network. He mentioned that communities of any kind, whether they’re into “League of Legends, the New York Rangers, or My Little Pony,” can find a space to talk about their interests and organically build a community around it.

He went on to say that while Reddit can provide a home to communities of any kind, giving structure and legitimacy to even the most fringe of interests, you have to take the good with the bad.

“There’s also plenty of space for the negative things. You hear all the time about highly politicized subreddits that are cyberbullying people over their beliefs and views. It’s like democracy in its purest and rawest form.”

The necessity for nuance in digital marketing

Reddit can teach digital marketers a lot of lessons about their craft. On Reddit, communities that form around particular interests can upvote and downvote posts to help content they collectively enjoy rise to the top, while ignoring or removing content they don’t want to see. It’s a form of democratic content curation that can teach marketers a thing or two about how to interact with a particular group of people.

That Reddit embraces any interest under the sun show marketers just how important it is for their ads to be nuanced – people want to be treated as people, who are defined by their experiences and desires, not by stereotyped behaviors.

“Everybody has quirks, idiosyncrasies, and things that they enjoy that other people won't and they won't get. And that's something I think marketers miss. You know, they want to go for homogeneity in a person. They want to categorize people and audiences and put them in buckets and say, this is the way to approach this bucket.”

The Julius Profiles podcast features guests like Stephen who share their unique, dynamic, and nuanced points of view on the influencer marketing industry. Subscribe now to hear more podcasts like this.

Subscribe to the Julius Profiles Podcast:

Apple Podcasts | RSS Feed | Google | Stitcher |

TuneIn | Spotify | Android