We have one for the GenZennials today, an interview with the co-founder of The Influencer Marketing Factory, an agency that has done lots of work recently with TikTok.

Let’s find out more about how Alessandro Bogliari works, and what his average day looks like.

Please describe your job: What do you do?

I am the Co-Founder and CEO of The Influencer Marketing Factory. Since this is a fairly new company (started 1 year and 2 months ago) but is growing really fast, I have been taking care of different roles and wearing several different “hats” on my head. I do all the marketing, PR, long-term strategy, choose the tools to use and workflow optimization. We have a team of 10 people at the moment, but some tasks – especially at the beginning – are too crucial to be delegated. And also only the founders can have that passion to do the extra mile every day.

Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?

I am on top of it together with my Co-Founder (Nicla Bartoli) with whom I discuss every important matter and take decisions with

What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?

Many of them: growth hacking, long-term strategic planning, team management, technical skills (even a bit of coding when needed), networking (and be interesting) and thinking out-of-the-box

Tell us about a typical working day…

I start the day from the bed with a little bit of social media to wake up and then I drink my first espresso (as every real Italian!). Then I check if there’s any emergency on our Trello or if anyone of my team wrote me on Slack. After that, I start reading about the industry and news (I read about 10-20 articles per day about influencer marketing, social media, and even finance and politics, since they are sometimes related to what we do).

Then I go to the office where I can focus better – we are a 100% remote company and only us two founders are physically in an amazing working space in Manhattan. It’s good to have it to be more productive and have a great place for meetings with clients. The rest of the day is a mix of daily activities and long-term planning. I might have some calls with journalists that ask me about the future of influencer marketing or, mostly lately, specifically about TikTok. You have to mix together boring tasks and thinking about the big plan for your company 🙂

What do you love about your job? What sucks?

I love that it is dynamic, that we don’t have to be all stuck in an office in a 9-5 type of job, and also that I can work with social media and the latest trends, so it’s never boring.

What sucks, instead, is that sometimes it is difficult to educate the client on what matters when it comes to influencer marketing; another thing that I don’t like is that there are tons of other agencies that say they are influencer marketing experts, but at the end of the day don’t really execute good campaign nor provide enough data/reporting at the end of the campaign and this doesn’t help in terms of reputation for the influencer marketing industry

What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?

Each of our clients have different KPIs and we discuss this with them before starting a new campaign. It can be app downloads, signups on a new platform or even just brand awareness. For us as a company, we calculate the retention rate of our clients (multiple campaigns instead of a one-shot activity) as a success metric. And also their happiness (but that’s quite subjective and personal to calculate, isn’t it?)

What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?

Trello to organize tasks and deadlines. Slack to communicate with the team. Google Calendar to organize meetings and sales calls. Google Docs for blog articles, Google Spreadsheets for anything with numbers (from influencer lists to cost/revenues analysis for each campaign). Then we have a lot of specific tools to manage our campaigns and track Instagram and TikTok campaigns, tracking link creation and custom audiences management.

How did you come to co-found The Influencer Marketing Factory, and where might you go from here?

After years in the influencer marketing industry and with always an entrepreneurial mindset (I created my first startup when I was 18) I thought it was time to play harder. I was lucky to co-create this company with the same person (Nicla Bartoli) with whom I co-created my first startup, so we already sharing the same values and this helped a lot in terms of being on the same page.

What is your favourite brand or marketing use of TikTok that you’ve seen so far? Which uses of the medium have most impressed you?

We worked on different songs for music labels such as Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music Group. It’s amazing to see how only 5 TikToks can start a hashtag challenge that gets 20M+ organic reach and thousands and thousands of earned media videos. We are adding, just this week, more case studies here.

What advice would you give to companies who are trying to determine whether to invest in influencer marketing, particularly on an emerging platform like TikTok or Twitch?

TikTok is not for everyone: It is an app that doesn’t run on the typical social media rules. It is not Instagram and for this reason companies that want to invest in influencer marketing on TikTok, have to trust the tiktokers without trying to force them in creating something that’s not really TikTok native.

Read more on TikTok and influencer marketing.