Get to Know Sarah Boyd: Influencer Marketing with Authenticity and Connection

Unlock the secrets behind crafting authentic connections in the digital world with Sarah Boyd, the CEO of The Digital Dept.  As Sarah peels back the curtain on the industry, we're granted an insider's look at the intricate dance between influencers and brands—a strategy that's less about follower count and more about forging genuine relationships.

Follow Sarah's path from Pennsylvania to the glittering hub of Los Angeles, where she made her mark in the fashion and beauty scene.  She now fully embraces the South Florida lifestyle with her husband and daughter in Delray Beach. 

@sarahpboyd

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome, welcome everyone, to Local Living Community Podcast for Palm Beach to Parkland. I'm David Conway, your host for today's episode. We have something a little different, really cool guest. She's a local resident. Her name is Sarah Boyd. She is the CEO of the digital department, which is an influencer marketing agency. She's also a mom. She's a wife and let's just throw in a fashion and beauty contributor to Forbes magazine. Sarah Boyd, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Thank you, excited to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:44

Yeah, it's great to have you, so why don't you start out? Could you tell us a little bit more about what the digital department is and what you do?

Speaker 2: 0:53

Absolutely yes. So the digital department, it's an influencer marketing agency full 360. So essentially, you can come to us with any influencer marketing needs. We have three divisions of the company. One is talent management. We manage about 200 plus influencers all across the country, from traditional content creators and fashion, beauty, lifestyle to celebrities and everything in between. So that's the main piece of our business. We also have a brand division where we work with brands and create their strategy for influencer marketing. And then we have an events and experiential division where we plan anything from a small influencer dinner to a 700 person conference. So all things experiential and events. And we do mailers, we do gifting to influencers, so you're one stop shop for anything influencer marketing.

Speaker 1: 1:52

So I'm a little old school and it seems that there are a lot of self proclaimed influencers out there. I know my kids. That's what they want to do when they're older. They just want to be influencers at this part. But from your vantage point, what actually qualifies someone as an influencer someone that you can use to market your brands that you're working with effectively?

Speaker 2: 2:17

Yes, I know my eight year old wants to be a YouTuber as well. I think they say 85% of kids nowadays want to be an influencer, which is exciting but also kind of sad.

Speaker 1: 2:26

Very comforting, very comforting. Thank you for validating my fears. I appreciate that.

Speaker 2: 2:33

So I mean influencers can be as small as someone with a few thousand followers. They're called like nano, micro influencers, all the way up to multi millions. But I've been in this industry for 12 plus years, since they were called bloggers and Instagram didn't even exist, and what I've seen over the last I would say, five years is people used to just look at the big number, like oh, they have a million followers. But now the brands and we look at how much are they actually influencing, which means how many people are engaging with their content, how many people are purchasing what they recommend or going to that restaurant that they talked about. What is that engagement rate? As opposed to that vanity big number of followers, because we've seen so many talent that we have that have. They might have a million followers but no one's purchasing what they talk about, and then we could have someone with 50,000 followers that drives hundreds of sales. So it really depends on engagement and how much they're actually purchasing or influencing that purchasing decision.

Speaker 1: 3:44

So I know it's not an exact science, but when you say there may be someone with a million followers and I know you just threw that number out there but that's not getting the level of engagement or actual purchases, what could possibly be the reasoning behind that? Is it the demographic that's following them, or what would you attribute that to?

Speaker 2: 4:05

Yeah, we have strategy sessions all the time with our talent to understand their audience. So, someone with a million followers, they may not be engaging with their audience in the way that they should be. So, being authentic, opening up the door to their real life, showing what they're eating for breakfast and what skincare they're using and what their kids are playing with all of those things really create that one-to-one relationship with their followers. So that's really what we teach our talent is to truly be authentic, open up your life, share little pieces of it that. Why are people there to follow you? It's not to just look at beautiful images anymore. It's really to understand the person behind the Instagram and what makes you tick and what you're buying and what you're loving in life and really build that trust with your audience. And when a creator does that, that's when we see the increased engagement. It's like really building that one-on-one relationship.

Speaker 1: 5:08

So sharing what you had for breakfast is actually a good thing if you're an influencer.

Speaker 2: 5:13

It is yeah, you have to show your whole life.

Speaker 2: 5:15

So people I mean it's crazy Some of these followers, like followers of our creators, know them almost better than they know themselves. They're like wait, you wouldn't use that product, why are you talking about it? So it also goes hand in hands with the ads that we book for them. That's our job. Is we get them the paid brand partnerships. And if a lot of our top creators say no more than they say yes to brands because it's not truly something that they use every day and would talk about on their social so that's another reason they become really great influencers is their particular in what they put their name on and they build again that trust with the audience. So the audience and fans know if they're talking about this product, they love it and it's a fantastic product and I trust them and I will buy it, as opposed to someone that's just posting, you know, a new brand every single day that doesn't align with who they are as a person.

Speaker 1: 6:14

Now that makes sense. So you obviously have a super cool job. For many young men and women I'm sure it's a dream job. But, sarah, can you tell us a little bit more about your background, where you're from? How did you get into the industry?

Speaker 2: 6:30

Yeah, I grew up in Pennsylvania, york, pennsylvania. I went to school in Philly for actually fashion merchandising. I thought I wanted to be a fashion buyer. About a year into it I was like no, I don't think I want to do this anymore. Too many numbers. So then I moved to LA in 2004 and worked in fashion PR for about 10 years, really took advantage of building my network in Los Angeles. I was going to probably four events a night. I was networking every single day just building my Rolodex for those that know what a Rolodex is nowadays I do I do, but really just building my relationships in my network.

Speaker 2: 7:14

For 10 years I left that job and I started my own company called Simply, which is a fashion and beauty conference, and started building that. We had tens of thousands of attendees at these conferences because there was nothing like it at the time and it was a place for people to come in the fashion and beauty industry to really network, meet like-minded women, understand who these new brands are that wanted to engage in fashion and beauty. And then I'd have these amazing panels with stylists and bloggers at the time and editors and all of these really cool people that had these jobs that you couldn't go to school to be. You kind of had to know someone. So I created that know someone platform where you could come and actually meet these people.

Speaker 1: 8:01

And were these conferences just in LA, or did you do them all over? How did that work?

Speaker 2: 8:06

No, well, it started in LA.

Speaker 2: 8:07

We expanded to New York, la, chicago, we did Dubai three times.

Speaker 2: 8:12

So, yeah, it was definitely a need in the marketplace and as I was building that business, a lot of the celebrities that I knew for my PR days started coming to me and asking if I could help monetize their social platform. And this was again before. I think that this is like right when Instagram started and it was an untapped market because no one was really paying attention to monetizing social media. So I started working with probably 15 or 20 celebrities and then that business got acquired by the company where I'm at now. It's been acquired a few times since, but that was in 2011. And yeah, here we are, you know 2024, and we've morphed and grown into the digital department, which we're a team of about 55 between LA, new York, miami and Nashville, and we're owned by Dolphin Entertainment, which is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ. So there's been a lot of growth, since the early days of me being scrappy and starting my conference with two people working for me, to now having a big team and publicly traded on the stock market.

Speaker 1: 9:27

What an amazing run. So, regarding your business, there's gotta be a lot of myths and misconceptions people have about what you do or how it works. Is there one or two that you hear a lot that people just come in making an assumption, but they're way off base.

Speaker 2: 9:47

Yeah, they all think being an influencer is easy because the good influencers make it look really easy. But it is work. Think about it. You're a model, you're hair and makeup, you're styling, you're the producer, you're the director, you're the social media content creator. You're doing like 15 jobs in one and a business owner. It's truly a business just organizing your life and your calendar and your partnerships and your organic posts. And I mean it is a full, full, full-time job and it's not easy and it's crowded. Now, when I started, there was maybe 20 influencers in LA and now there's thousands across the world.

Speaker 1: 10:31

So, from LA to Del Rey, what brought you over here?

Speaker 2: 10:38

So it was COVID, and so I have two step-sons and their mom lived in LA or still does, so we wanted to wait for them to get a little bit older. So they were 16 and 19 when we moved and it was COVID. So both of our jobs went remote pretty immediately. So my husband and I always had the long-term goal to come to Florida. But it kind of fast-tracked with COVID and within a few months we sold everything and moved to Del Rey Beach with our now eight-year-old daughter, ava, and it has been the best move we've ever had. I mean, it has been incredible. Everyone's like do you miss LA? Honestly, yes, I miss some of my family and a few things, but honestly, we absolutely love it here. The ease of life there's no traffic, there's I mean, just every single thing about it here. We couldn't be happier, and we're on our third year now.

Speaker 1: 11:40

So a lot of my neighbors made the move during COVID. I live in Parkland and did you buy your house sight unseen, or did you come out here and try to pick a spot first? How did that work?

Speaker 2: 11:54

Yeah, so I know it was insane when we were moving here. So we did put an offer on a house, sight unseen, just on Redfin, and we flew out and we went to look at a bunch of other homes and that was it. That was the last house that we saw, and then our real estate agent was like let's go look at this one other house. So we went across the street we're in seven bridges so we saw this house and as soon as I walked in I was like this is it. We have to get out of the other house.

Speaker 2: 12:22

This is our home.

Speaker 1: 12:23

You had your moment.

Speaker 2: 12:25

I had the full moment and we got out of the other offer and ended up getting this house and I love the neighborhood, I love our neighbors, I love the events that they do the golf cart life. It's incredible, so we're very happy here.

Speaker 1: 12:43

You've obviously had an incredible run You're a dynamo but was there a time in your life where maybe you had a challenge or two that you overcame that maybe even could benefit you now?

Speaker 2: 12:59

I mean every day. I feel like I have some sort of challenge.

Speaker 1: 13:03

Funny how that works right.

Speaker 2: 13:04

Yeah, I mean-.

Speaker 1: 13:06

We've all got our story, don't we?

Speaker 2: 13:07

Yes, personally I think moving and leaving the boys before they finished high school or the one finished high school that was really hard, especially for my husband. But the blessing of COVID was they were in California so they had no schools, so we were able to fly them back and forth and we actually got almost six months out of the year with them. With COVID they would just do school from our house here. That was tough leaving the kids, but now one of them is off to college, the other one is finishing college, so they've spread their wings and they absolutely love it here too. So they get the best of both worlds they get to live in California and Florida. So I think that was really tough for us as a family and also their little sister. They used to see each other every day so we had to break up a family but luckily it was only for a couple of years and we were able to go back and forth and see them quite a bit.

Speaker 1: 14:07

And it's only geographic right. We're still a family, we're still together, and a lot of the things that maybe throw me off. As far as modern technology, they help to keep us together, though, don't they?

Speaker 2: 14:20

Absolutely. Yeah. We make sure we do family trips every year and I feel like we get more quality time with them, as opposed to just popping in and out for an hour or two here or there, and they're off with their friends most of the time. Here. They don't have friends, so we've got them all of ourselves.

Speaker 1: 14:35

That's funny. So you love Del Ray. What do you like to do for fun?

Speaker 2: 14:41

Well, I love my workout. I do every day. I do nine-round boxing on Yamato.

Speaker 1: 14:48

Shout out to the nine-round boxing.

Speaker 2: 14:50

We love them. Josh is the owner, he's the sweetest and just. It's a fun workout. It's 30 minutes in and out, you don't need an appointment, you pay a fee and you can go two times a day if you want. So that's my morning meditation. That I love. What else do I do for fun? I love going out to eat. So my daughter is in competitive gymnastics, so every Friday my husband and I have from 5 to 8 pm to do date night. So every Friday we try a new restaurant, so we're checking off the list slowly but surely. We've been to quite a few at this point and Del Ray keeps growing so there's always new restaurants to try, and same with Boca, so it's been fun. We love just eating out, getting to travel locally whether it's the Keys or Sanibel Island or the Bahamas, everything's so close and just love getting to explore a new place.

Speaker 1: 15:45

So I know you don't technically consider yourself an influencer, but I know you have an Instagram presence yourself. How could someone follow you if they wanted to find you an Instagram?

Speaker 2: 15:57

Yeah, it's just Sarah P Boyd, s-a-r-a-h-p-b-o-y-d. Yeah, I post a lot about local Del Ray things that we're doing a lot about my daughter, so be prepared to see lots of 8-year-old gymnastics content and sometimes some fun fashion and beauty stuff.

Speaker 1: 16:16

And if I'm a local business owner that has never really used influencer marketing but might want to stick my toe in the water, how could they reach out to you and learn more about the digital department?

Speaker 2: 16:27

Yeah, so the digital department. The website is thedigitaldeptcom, or you can just DM me on Instagram and I can send you an email and get you pointed in the right direction.

Speaker 1: 16:41

Sarah, it's been great having you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

Speaker 2: 16:45

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 16:47

Okay, everybody, thanks for joining us Again. That was Sarah Boyd, local resident here in Del Ray Beach. I'm David Conway, your host of Local Living, and we look forward to having you next time.