Breaking the Marketing Mold: Kim Murray Of Virality Boost On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Think bigger! Scale up your influencer channel to 10, 25, 50, or even more influencers each month. This helps the social media AI learn and lets you target different audiences with precision.
Traditional marketing methods are no longer sufficient in today’s dynamic and fast-evolving market. To truly engage and captivate audiences, businesses need to think outside the box and adopt innovative and non-traditional marketing strategies. What are these strategies, and how can they transform audience engagement? I had the pleasure of interviewing Kim Murray.
Kim Murray is a leading authority in influencer and affiliate marketing. Since 2010, she has managed 76 affiliate programs for a diverse range of clients, including major retailers, streaming services, and emerging brands. In 2015, Kim launched an influencer network to enhance her brands’ affiliate programs, resulting in over 5,000 successful influencer campaigns to date. She is also the founder of Virality Boost, a comprehensive full-service influencer marketing agency with its own network of influencers. Her team works with influencers as content distributors, orchestrating large-scale campaigns to drive client growth.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! To start, could you share when and how you got started in marketing?
I got started in digital marketing through affiliate marketing back in 2012. I worked at an affiliate marketing agency, handling over 20 clients, mostly e-commerce brands. Although, one of my favorite clients was with an online coding course program. That’s when I started noticing the power of influencer marketing, though back then it was called blogger marketing. I would partner with tech bloggers and have them review the course then they would implement their SEO magic to drive free trial sign-ups. When I launched the first influencer network in affiliate and used affiliate links to track performance in 2015, I noticed early on that influencer marketing drove demand for my clients and saw the results in their affiliate program. I’m lucky to have started with affiliate and influencer marketing because of its cross-channel, cross-platform nature which helped me to understand digital marketing in a unique way.
What has been the biggest shift in the marketing industry and can you give us an example of how it impacted you?
I don’t see a single shift; it’s more like a geometric shift.
In the influencer world, creators are asking for more money, and with agents and tools piling on costs, it’s getting tough to justify the ROI. Influencer UGC is tricky — it’s more about entertainment than driving action and controlling the message and scaling up is difficult. Plus, with social media platforms updating their AI, you need to feed it data to effectively and efficiently find and grow your target audiences to boost performance.
Affiliate marketing has been hit hard, too, especially with all the tech updates since early last year. Take iOS 17’s Link Tracking Protection, for example — it strips tracking info from URLs, making it tough to track users across various touchpoints. Big players like Google and Meta are also on board with this. Plus, Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies from 2024 to early 2025, along with GDPR disclosure requirements, has made it challenging for everyone in the industry, especially marketing decision-makers.
Traditionally, digital marketing performance has been all about direct marketing attribution — spend a dollar, get five back. But now, a customer’s journey can be super simple with just one touchpoint if they’re ready to buy, or it can involve over 50 touchpoints across multiple channels. With so many platforms in a brand’s digital stack — search, social, affiliate, email — they all want credit for a sale. This makes it tough for companies to make sound budgeting decisions. Their teams are used to focusing on channel-level performance for budgeting, which makes sense given how marketing budgets are set up. But things are changing, and it’s a whole new ball game now.
The biggest impact for me has been testing out different influencer and call-to-action combos to get a feel for the social media algorithms. We also had to navigate affiliate tracking challenges, the process put me in touch with different decision-makers, so our target customer has broadened to include stakeholders. Teaming up with a brand’s analytics team and upper management to track how our influencer campaigns were performing has been super insightful. Seeing those big jumps in topline Dcom revenue is really exciting. Now, I see influencer marketing in a whole new light — it’s a powerful growth strategy for companies to drive new traffic plus bring new audiences to their main channels, not just affiliate.
Can you explain why it’s essential for businesses to break away from traditional marketing and embrace new strategies?
If brands are making budgeting decisions solely on direct marketing attribution, they are leaving a lot of money on the table in new customer acquisition and market share. The customer journey isn’t linear anymore, and companies need a spherical strategy that crosses platforms and channels with an upper funnel driving force to reach new target audiences that can be scaled up. It’s about combining traditional advertising — driving demand and awareness — giving people a reason to buy and inspiring action — with new AI audience targeting tactics. In my opinion, influencer marketing and social media AI is the top audience targeting strategy, and when executed properly it can fuel the performance of a business’s other core channels.
Could you share and briefly explain the first major change you made to break the trend of traditional marketing that was not so common?
I launched Virality Boost, a full-service influencer marketing agency where we use influencers as distributors of content — think brand awareness, promotions, product launches, gift guides, listicles, etc. We control the messaging and team up with 10, 20, or 50 plus influencers to get a brand buzzing, working with social media algorithms to find and grow the perfect audience for their business. This approach lets us test, learn, and pinpoint the top-performing influencers, turning them into a powerful channel for driving demand and supporting other key areas like search, email, social, and affiliate.
What specific results did you see after implementing this change?
Clients have experienced a 15% to 30% revenue boost running match market tests. One regional client turned its downward trend around and saw a 20% year-over-year increase, along with doubling growth for a sister brand. Another client hit a 17% conversion rate, which lines up with their other main channels that are mid to lower funnel.
How do you ensure that these new marketing strategies resonate with your target audience?
We’ve found that positive messaging and eye-catching visuals that is on-brand work best to motivate influencer audiences. By sharing content through influencers, we can steer the messaging and tweak it to fit each audience group perfectly.
Can you share an example of something you tried that didn’t deliver expected results or ended up ended up becoming a financial burden, and what you learned from that experience?
We’ve kicked off several campaigns with affiliate clients, using either hybrid or straight performance payouts. But, thanks to all the tech updates and tracking issues, our conversion rates were uncommonly low. We pay influencers a flat fee, so not only did we pay them, but we also lost money on boosting budgets. I quickly realized that we needed to develop a closer relationship with the company’s stakeholders to look at the results in a holistic way. When our clients did, there was a real wow factor — seeing the power and potential of what I call influencer content distribution, I decided to create a full-service influencer marketing agency, while still working on a scheduled campaign basis as an affiliate partner.
Great. Now, let’s dive into the heart of our interview. Could you list “5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before”?
- Using influencer content distribution as your main strategy is incredibly effective. Your influencer content distribution campaign allows you to be creative, opening different ways to leverage content, and drive performance for underperforming investments like editorials, affiliate placements, or build email lists. If you launched a product, get the reach and traffic to test its viability and refine your messaging using user comments.
- Think bigger! Scale up your influencer channel to 10, 25, 50, or even more influencers each month. This helps the social media AI learn and lets you target different audiences with precision.
- Create a campaign theme that influencer audiences can get excited about and act on. For example, a client donates 1% of sales to Planet Conservation, so we created a “1% For The Planet” campaign. It really took off and performance exceeded our expectations.
- Geo-targeting is a huge opportunity in influencer for match market tests, attractions, local events, local sports, retailers, and franchises — influencers are not just for e-commerce.
- Try using predictive KPIs like conversion rates and AOV. Figure out the traffic needed to meet your revenue goals. After running a few campaigns, you’ll get a feel for the kind of reach needed to boost top-line sales. Keep an eye out for the halo effect in your other channels.
What challenges might companies face when transitioning away from traditional marketing strategies, and how can they overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges is the fear of running large-scale influencer campaigns with 10, 20, or even 50 influencers, it can feel overwhelming. By not running influencers at scale, you miss out on the real AI capabilities of social platforms that offer incredible audience targeting and drive durable business impact. Another key challenge is how companies choose their influencers, they typically focus on follower counts and aesthetics to choose influencers and look at engagements as success indicators. Influencers can buy followers and buy engagements — they do that (not all) so they can justify high rates — it is not an indicator of an ROI-proven influencer. To tackle these challenges, companies should see that large-scale influencer content distribution allows them to control the messaging, lower costs and reduce the risk of non-performance. This approach can help achieve goals like sales growth, bringing in new customers, boosting product visibility, and expanding market reach and market share, all while enhancing brand credibility.
How do you measure the success and ROI of these new marketing strategies?
I’ve found that keeping it simple with MoM and YOY measurements for top-line revenue growth is the best way to gauge success. We focus and optimize on KPIs like reach, traffic, traffic to reach %, and event actions like add to cart, AOV, conversion rates, CPC, and CPM. Since influencers can buy engagements on individual posts, we look for patterns between comments and likes, while shares can give us great insight into the content’s value and the influencer’s authority in a particular category. We also use ROAS to spot any halo effects in affiliate marketing and CAC to identify lifts in other channels.
Looking forward, how do you see the role of innovative marketing evolving in the next 5–10 years?
I think companies are starting to realize it’s all about scale, and that will continue. Influencer marketing strategies are going to keep evolving, and AI tools will help us to dynamically tailor content for niche audiences. We’ll figure out ethical ways to handle the tightening data privacy regulations while collecting and patterning customer data to improve journey mapping and identify spending overlaps. Overall, digital marketing performance is pretty predictive, but it’s only going to get more so.
What advice would you give to business leaders who are hesitant to move away from traditional marketing methods?
If you’re struggling with influencer marketing, it’s time to reassess and think on a larger scale. Businesses should utilize influencers as content distributors. While continuing with user-generated content is valuable, ensure you couple it with a solid distribution plan. The goal is to expand your reach and grow your target audience effectively — it’s all about building momentum. Adopt a digital commerce investment-driven approach: set realistic revenue targets and budget for this channel and look for performance lifts in other key areas. Make influencer marketing an integral part of your growth strategy. Ensure you establish proper influencer tracking. If you’re working on a cross-channel strategy, make sure you’ve got a good plan to track performance. When spotting halo effects, don’t forget to consider new email sign-ups and the lifetime value of new customers to measure the full value of your influencer campaign.
Can you share any upcoming initiatives or plans you have for further innovating your marketing strategies?
We’ve had great success with geo-targeted influencer campaigns and are thinking about expanding into the attractions market. Also, we’ve partnered with editorial publishers to offer editorial placements like listicles, and gift guides, with our influencer content distribution.
How can our readers follow your work and learn more about your approaches to modern marketing?
Connect or DM on Linkedin: Kim Murray.
This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur and Thought Leader with over 25 years of business experience. He has founded, operated, and exited multiple companies and now builds into a handful of high impact CEOs. Chad has launched multiple online communities, including a recent leadership development platform, and also serves as a strategic advisor for Authority Magazine’s thought-leader incubator program.
To learn more and connect with Chad visit: chadsilverstein.io
Breaking the Marketing Mold: Kim Murray Of Virality Boost On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.