Galan Leather Co. sells a fairly niche product: handmade leather and wood writing accessories, plus other craft goods for writing and stationery enthusiasts. If you were to choose a social media platform that would be the key to their success, you’d likely have chosen Instagram, maybe even Pinterest.
But their highest-converting platform is YouTube, thanks to the help of micro-influencers. “We’ve spent seven years fine-tuning our YouTube micro-influencer strategy,” Co-founder Yusuf Perens, says. “Thanks to that commitment, we now get over 20,000 visitors from YouTube each year.”
Here’s how they do it:
They focus on content and engagement over follower count
The Galan team starts by searching for creators who cover the keywords their ideal audience might use: planner setup, notebook reviews, bullet journaling, etc. From there, they focus on their content and engagement rather than follower count.
“We don’t pay too much attention to audience size because we’ve worked with folks who have large follower counts only to find their videos don’t receive many views,” Yusuf says. “Now, we focus more on engagement. Most of our partners have several hundred to several thousand followers.”
They ask for genuine feedback (good and bad)
Not providing too many guidelines allows for more authentic and relatable content, Yusuf believes — the last thing they want is for the videos to feel like “scripted sales pitches”.
“Think about it: If a product online only has positive reviews, it can seem unbelievable,” he says. “It’s much more authentic when someone shares feedback like, ‘This product is beautiful, but a little small’ or ‘I can tell the craftsmanship is wonderful, but distressed leather like this is not my style.’”
They focus on long-term wins instead of each individual campaign
Yusuf has learned this approach is a long game. Sometimes, new videos get results right away, but it’s more common for them to take time to gain views and search traction. “Instead of obsessing about trying to measure the impact of each video, we pay more attention to the overall benefits, both qualitative and quantitative.”
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