The Influencer

Powered by her Pioneer’s passion and entrepreneurial spirit, Erica Eckman ’08 finds success in one of America’s newest and most dynamic fields

Erica Eckman’s journey from Utica University to leading one of the country’s fastest growing direct-to-consumer influencer marketing agencies took her through uncharted territory.

Today, the founder and CEO of Ecko Digital Media heads a thirty-person agency consisting of talent management, brand management, and paid media. When she graduated from Utica in 2008 and completed her MBA at Brandeis, the concept of using digital spaces for promotion was in its very nascent stages, the term “influencer” hadn’t yet been coined, and, notably, those who would now call themselves influencers were not earning a living from the practice.

In 2012, she moved from Massachusetts to Chicago without a job, but with a quiet confidence and self-assuredness nurtured during her time at Utica. While looking at apartments, her realtor mentioned in passing that he was looking for a director of operations. The luxury division of his real estate company had begun to take off and grow more quickly than he could manage, and he was in need of someone to build and streamline workflow processes around signing leases.

“He’s in the middle of showing me an apartment, and I’m standing there listening to what he was saying and thinking, I have no idea what that means, but I can pretty much figure out anything, so I’m going to sell myself as his director of operations,” Eckman recalls. “Long story short, I got an apartment – great – and I had my first job.”

She fell in love with Chicago. A self-professed foodie, she was immediately drawn to the city’s rich culinary scene. She began posting on social media about restaurants she had visited and soon thereafter started a blog where she would share health-conscious recipes and joke about her kitchen life in the big city. She soon developed a following, which by a cruel twist of fortune did not go unnoticed by her employer.

“Four or five months into the job, my boss kind of got word of what I was doing and he was like, ‘You know, your vibe that you’re putting out on social media is incredibly self-deprecating. We’re a luxury real estate company, and I don’t think the brand that you’re coming out with fits into our brand,’” she says.

Not-so-subtle expressions of disapproval soon escalated to the point of ultimatum: advance her career in the lucrative luxury real estate industry or take a giant entrepreneurial leap without any clear notion of where it would land her.

“It was a rude awakening,” she says. “I was making what at that time was more money than I could have ever imagined. To walk away from that to literally nothing was definitely scary, but I just had this belief that I could figure this out. I had this sort of vision.”

She wondered to herself, if she could grow a following just by showing up every day on social media, why couldn’t she monetize it, similar to how a celebrity or professional athlete gets endorsements?

“I figured I’d go for it,” she says. “I essentially tried to become what is now called an influencer, but back then I was a girl with a couple thousand followers trying to pay her rent.”

Her bet on herself was initially greeted with a brick wall of sobering reality. “People had no idea what I was thinking. I realized really quickly that nobody understood why you would pay some regular girl to come eat at their restaurant or promote their products and write about it online,” she says.

She decided to bridge the gap financially by starting an agency to run social media accounts. She figured if she could grow her own following, she could help other businesses and brands build theirs.

Determined, she pounded the pavement knocking on doors all over Chicago. A few restaurants and local brands hired her to run their social media. As she gained footing, more opportunities followed. Soon, the Hilton Group approached her about managing the social media for their Chicago restaurants. Others followed. Her reputation and reach were growing rapidly. Her business venture was taking off, and she was looking forward to a very successful 2020.

“And then COVID hit,” she says, “and the restaurants shut down, and overnight everything I had worked for evaporated.”

Finding a new direction

Stranded inside by pandemic lockdowns, Eckman did what the rest of the socially-distanced world did. She adapted.

Direct-to-consumer brands exploded during the first weeks and months of COVID. Consumers expanded their online shopping habits to include items they would previously only buy in-person. Searches for online product reviews and customer experiences increased rapidly.

“I would post something, and I would get thousands of link clicks,” Eckman says. “So I thought, ‘Why don’t I start reaching out to brands that I love, and tell them, hey, you give me a certain budget, and I’m going to get you a return on that investment.’”

Success came quickly, and after operating as a single-person enterprise, Eckman decided to hedge her bets in order to scale her business. She spent hours online searching for and identifying individuals with profiles much like her own: ordinary, relatable individuals who can engage and build trust with an audience by promoting products they believe in and sharing their experiences openly.

“I realized I have a very good eye for understanding influence,” she says. “I started signing these (individuals) who the big agencies wouldn’t even look at. For example, I hired a woman who was working as a paralegal in a law office, and she was on a diabetes journey. She had ten thousand followers, but I knew she was going to outsell someone with a million followers. I was like, these people drive measurable value.”

Fast forward to the present, Ecko Digital Media now represents sixty-five influencers who are helping businesses, primarily in the food, health, and wellness sectors, leverage the power of authentic and persuasive content creators. In addition, Eckman, soon after starting the talent division, co-founded a DTC functional beverage and supplement company, FlavCity, with one of the influencers she represents.

“I started to get a reputation in the direct-to-consumer space helping these brands online scale really quickly,” says Eckman, now in Boca Raton, Florida. “I wanted to have my own brand because I know how to do this. So I started that, scaled it up, and so now we’re here. It’s been awesome. There’s been a lot of amazing highs and some crazy hard lows, but you figure it out every time.”

Lighting the fire

Even more than a fundamentally strong business education, Eckman credits her experiences at Utica for fostering in her the confidence and leadership that have set her up for success – and lit a fire – at every crossroad in her career path.

“When I think about my time at Utica, it’s the environment, the opportunities, and the belief that everyone there had in me that resonate most and I feel have shaped me in a lot of ways.

“I had a really hard time getting into college,” she recalls poignantly. “I didn’t do well in high school and had a lot of turmoil between my sophomore and junior year. I was a low B-C student and my SAT scores weren’t that great. When I started applying to colleges, I had turned it around from a grade perspective at that point, but everywhere I applied, they looked at my transcript and were just like, ‘Uh, no. We don’t feel like you’ll transition well.’”

When her search led her to Utica, things began to turn around. “They cared more about the fact that I had started a youth group chapter for USY (United Synagogue Youth) in my area. They looked more at that stuff, saw that I had turned (my grades) around, and saw I was committed. I feel like Utica saw something in me, and their belief in me gave me the confidence to say, ‘Wow, I can do this,’ even when the world says I can’t.”

Eckman has helped drive millions in revenue for a multitude of DTC brands, including her own. But for her, the true measure of success is not calculated solely in dollars but also in the extent to which she is able to improve the lives of others.

“We’re impacting a lot of lives, and I love what I do,” she says proudly. “We’re a women-led and run company - I employ thirty unbelievably talented women, and we’ve interacted with almost any brand you can think of over the years. We have sixty-five influencers, most of whom had been unhappily grinding away at full-time jobs for years and now are pursuing their passion, sharing their journeys or their struggles or whatever it is online, and making a living doing it.”

“I take brands that have some of the most incredible life-changing products and I’m able to give them a national platform to gain awareness. That to me is what defines success,” says Eckman.

As for what comes next, she is introspective about her career ambitions.

“When I talk about where I go from here, I don’t know,” she says. “What I’ve achieved is beyond what I even had the capacity to comprehend. It's pretty cool, but it’s also a moment of, ‘If my dreams were bigger than I could’ve imagined, and now I’ve achieved them, how do I reframe what my (future) goals look like?’ From when I got my first job to the real estate opportunity and everything that followed, I’ve always felt like I made it. And yet sometimes I think, ‘Whoa, this is crazy!’”