Every month more than 3 million searches happen on YouTube for the keyword:
Fiverr.
That’s a lot of traffic.
If you’re not familiar with Fiverr, it’s a marketplace that started back in 2010.
The name comes from the original price of the gigs or jobs posted on the site having a cost of a “fiver” ($5.00) per task. Since those humble beginnings, the marketplace has evolved quite substantially with a $5.4 billion market cap and services industries ranging from voice overs & SEO to logo design and video game training.
That’s right…
You can hire someone on Fiverr to train you on how to be better at Fortnite.
Fiverr charges sellers (the video game trainer) just $1 for any sale under $20 and a 5% fee for any sale over $20 (the voice over professional) – no matter what size sale Fiverr always charges a minimum processing fee of $1. It’s a fascinating business model in the times of a pandemic as more people are looking for ways to diversify their income on the back of gigs & freelancing.
But that’s not what I’m writing about today.
I’m writing today because I want to discuss the brilliance of the Fiverr’s marketing team and their utilization of influencers to connect with their audience.
The typical customer for Fiverr is going to be someone who is looking to have some sort of creative service provided. It could be a YouTuber who needs a script written. It could be an agency owner who needs an ebook designed. It could be a founder who needs a logo design. It could be a photographer who needs support with touch ups. Or it could be a videographer looking to have edits done to their commercial. The persona could vary…
But at the core — it’s someone who’s looking for creative or specialized services.
This is where the brilliance comes in.
Fiverr knows that one of the best ways to learn a creative talent (ie. video editing, script writing, photo editing, commercial design, etc) is through YouTube. Fiverr also knows that there are a handful of influencers on YouTube who have built followings in the millions by creating videos that help people build their creative skillset. In fact, I’ll be the first to admit that I used YouTube to learn how to set up my own home studio and what camera, lighting and mic would be best.
YouTube is the goto resource for the creative economy.
And here’s how the brilliance comes in…
Over the last few years, there’s been a surge in a YouTube format in which the YouTuber hires three people on Fiverr at different prices. Let’s say $5, $50 and $500 to do a certain service. It could be hiring them to make a song using their beat, it could be designing a sneaker or it could be illustrating a comic that the YouTuber came up with from scratch. The YouTuber then shows the viewer all three of the services signed, sealed & delivered in the video. Sometimes the audience is surprised to see that the $5 service was the best of the trio or sometimes the audience is simply amazed by the either the lack of talent or immense talent found on the site.
Here’s three videos using this format:
- I Paid a Stranger $25 to edit my Pizza Commercial
- I Paid Photoshop ‘Experts’ to edit this photo better than me
- I Paid Animators on FIVERR To Finish My Cartoon...
You might not of clicked any of those links… But I encourage you to revisit them later today because the storytelling alone is worth watching. I also want you to take note of the view count:
12,957,601 + 6,396,003 + 3,409,038 = 22M+ views
And that’s just 3 videos.
I’ve come across more than 50 different videos all focused on “Paying Fiverr to do XYZ”.
Sure… Some of these videos have 25,000 views but some of them have millions. Combined there’s more than 100M views across all of these videos. And in case you didn’t know:
Last year 99.9 million people watched the Super Bowl.
So yeah. These videos are quite valuable.
So valuable that Fiverr started to pay influencers directly to create the videos. In Peter McKinnon’s video I Paid Photoshop ‘Experts’ to edit this photo better than me; he introduces the video format and then clearly states that This video is brought to you by Fiverr…
This is content excellence on Fiverrs part.
Peter has 5.1M subscribers on YouTube and over 300,000 followers on Twitter. According to SparkToro, his followers describe themselves as YouTubers, Filmmakers, Videographers, Content Creators & Graphic Designers. The perfect audience for Fiverr.
This video shows Peter’s audience how Fiverr can make their lives easier without acting as an over the top, in your face, buy-buy-buy advertisement. It’s an advertorial thrown into a mixing bowl with a splash of edutainment to create a powerful content asset for Fiverr.
To tie things even closer to conversion, Peter is a part of Fiverr’s partner program. An affiliate program that offers the buyer of services a 15% discount on their first purchase while offering Peter a % of all transactions thereafter. This incentive provides alignment for both Fiverr & Peter making it in both of their best interests to ensure that the video reaches millions of people.
Influencer marketing as a concept often seems foreign to B2B brands. It’s often ignored and considered a tactic that should only be used to sell invisalign, phone cases and diet tea.
That’s not the case.
B2B doesn’t have to be boring.
And influencers can still play an important role in your growth.
I talked about this in detail back in 2018:
The key?
You just have to research who you’re trying to influence and understand who influences their perception.
It’s not always who you think. But with the appropriate research and understanding of your audience’s motivations – You can unlock a special kind of content excellence.
Want to learn more about how Fiverr has been able to drive growth through content? This Twitter thread is a great starting point on how they’ve built a successful growth engine:
The Gig economy is real and @fiverr is winning.
They’re not just selling $5 gigs. Avg spend is $177.Some facts:
2.5 million buyers in Q1 2020
$107 M revenue (+42%)
43M /yr organic visits
58M backlinks
$3.5B market capWhy are they winning? A great content engine.
[THREAD] 🧵 pic.twitter.com/7Ztt49dcHa— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) August 4, 2020
