MarTech Interview Series with Aliza Freud, CEO, SheSpeaks

Hi, Aliza. Welcome to our Interview Series. Please tell us a little bit about your journey in the marketing space. What inspired you to start SheSpeaks?  

I’m what you might call a “career marathoner.” I have only worked 2 places my entire career. I spent the first part of my career working as a marketing and branding executive at American Express. The 2nd part of my career has been as an entrepreneur launching and growing SheSpeaks.  I observed how companies were accelerating their efforts in order to appeal to female consumers. But they were often getting it all wrong. For example, creating a pink credit card is not a path toward acquiring more female consumers!  I launched SheSpeaks as a way to help marketers gain insights to create products that would match what female consumers wanted and needed.  After the launch, it became apparent that many of the women who were signing up to be on our consumer research panel were what we now refer to as, “influencers.”  and we recognized that there was a huge opportunity to tap into these influencers to help market products and services. This was the birth of SheSpeaks as an influencer marketing company, which is what we do today.

What kind of services do you offer for marketing organizations and digital agencies? 

We help marketers create and execute influencer marketing campaigns. This includes everything from selection of influencers, campaign execution, measurement and tracking as well as paid media amplification of the best-performing content.

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A lot of research is happening on AI and machine learning’s role in transforming branded content. Could you tell us about your experience with these technologies and how it influenced influencer marketing? 

AI tools have been a game changer in the influencer space as they help ensure campaign success. We use AI to help us identify the best influencers for each campaign we run. AI tools can help pinpoint influencers with the target audience we are seeking to reach as well as those with high engagement rates. This insight helps set campaigns up for success as we ensure that we are reaching the right audience through the most impactful and compelling influencers.

Tell us about your digital marketing campaigns? What kind of results do you generate from your various influencer content? 

The influencer campaigns we run are designed to build content, awareness and sales for our clients’ products. We measure results based on the quality of content created, engagements, sales and brand lift results. We do this for brands across a variety of categories including food, beauty, personal care and financial services. In a recent campaign that SheSpeaks ran for Hershey’s limited edition, “SHE IS” bars created to celebrate Women’s History Month, influencers were utilized to build content and awareness for the brand.  We took an insights first approach and surveyed target women to determine which women they would celebrate, where and why. The survey revealed an opportunity to build a movement of women supporting women with this campaign. Utilizing the right influencers the campaign successfully drove close to 100 million impressions, engaged over 7 million people, drove 200,000 engagements and helped Hershey’s drive significant in-store product sell-through vs. the competition.

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How do you measure the effectiveness of your influencer content? Are these mostly consistent with brand narratives—or, do you experiment with new ideas? 

We measure results based on the quality of content created, engagements, sales and brand lift results. We achieve the best results for brands when we brief influencers on the brand messaging but then allow them to create authentic benefit driven content that resonates with their audience. Influencers engage with their audience/followers all day every day. They have tremendous insight on what will drive engagement.  We ensure that influencers understand what the brand is trying to communicate and then let them create the message that will work best for their account.

We are curious about understanding the different content management strategies that emerged in the last 5 years. What are the key trends that emerged in the last 2 years post-COVID?

COVID has been a game changer for brands in terms of their openness to utilizing influencer content beyond organic posts. Over the last few years brands have seen the success of user-generated content in building awareness and sales for products. We have seen a significant increase in brands using high-performing influencer content in paid media, retail channels as well as owned and operated brand channels.  Brands are observing the success of influencer content on digital channels and the ROI is very strong.

What does your Marketing Technology stack look like? Could you tell us what tools you use for analytics, automation and content management? 

SheSpeaks has a proprietary platform that we developed to help us manage influencer data (CRM), campaigns and analytics including brand lift studies. The core components of our platform include customer relationship management (CRM), research and campaign management tools.

How can organizations quickly upskill their marketing workforce with new leadership training and e-learning concepts? Any case study that you would like to bring to our readers’ attention? N/A

Biggest challenges that could impact the way organizations hire and retain great influencers as employees? What do the contemporary talent war trends for influencers look like to you?

It is essential to have team members who understand how to create compelling influencer content first-hand. That is why we have hired influencers to be a part of our team not only for content creation but also recruiting and continuous innovation.  Influencers have keen marketing insights as they are constantly creating and pushing out content to an audience. They get immediate and clear feedback on what is working and what is not. They continuously learn from this experience and this knowledge is hugely valuable to clients we work with to ensure successful campaigns.

An event/ conference or podcast that you have subscribed to consume information about the B2B technology industry:

If invited, would you like to be part of a podcast episode on Ad tech/ martech, Automation / AI / NLP tech research? Yes, I would agree to be a guest. I love the podcast “What’s Next? With Rishad Tobaccowala”. Rishad interviews marketing and tech experts to better understand what will be the next innovation for the marketing, advertising and tech industries.