Name: Win B2B Mindshare Through Strategic Influencer Partnerships
Uploaded: 2025-03-19T19:21:10.869Z
Duration: 59 min 40 s
Description: Win B2B Mindshare Through Strategic Influencer Partnerships

Transcript for "Win B2B Mindshare Through Strategic Influencer Partnerships": Alright. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. You are at the Goldcast Insider Webinar in partnership with MarketingProfs. We are today covering one second. We are covering winning b two b mindshare through through strategic influencer partnerships. In a couple of moments, Ben Matano from Creator Buzz will be joining me. But before that, I'm gonna go over some housekeeping items. So first off, please share your comments and engage in the chat. We definitely wanna hear from the crowd. We wanna take questions, so let us know. Drop your questions into the q and a tab. And for anyone wondering, we are recording this, So the on demand recording will be available after the event, and then be sure to check the docs tab for helpful resources. We also have giveaways. Really, really cool exciting giveaways that I wish I could win myself, but, we have an Oura Ring gift card, a Yeti USB microphone, and a Sony headphone. And the ways in which you can win it is by one, showing up. So thank you for being here, engaging in the chat, submitting q and a, and then answering the polls. You will be randomly selected. So if you are a winner, we will let you know tomorrow. With that, what we're covering today. Hopefully, you all have seen we are very much into the concept of winning MyShare. So, today, we'll be talking about why winning my share, drives pipeline and revenue, how video content helps you win my share. We'll also be jumping into a practical framework for winning my share with influencer marketing. And then for fun at the end, we'll be doing some Mythbusters. So debonking misconceptions around influencer marketing. Love to hear if there's any other Mythbusters that you think we've missed. We'd love to talk about it, and then we'll jump into q and a. So with that, I'd love to invite Vin onto the stage. Alright. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Super excited about this. Awesome. Do you wanna do a brief intro? For sure. Yeah. Name is Ben Matano, founder of a company called Creator Buzz, which is a b to b influencer marketing agency. I'm also a content creator. So the idea of influencer marketing is something dear and true to my heart. And, as a creator, worked with over like 50 different brands from really big brands like Adobe and LinkedIn and Microsoft to, really, really small brands. And then from the campaign manager side, actually managing a bunch of, over a dozen different campaigns in the b to b space. So excited to chat more. Awesome. I realized I also forgot to intro myself, but hello. I'm Cindy, the director of growth marketing here at Goldcast. I've had the fortunate opportunity working with Ben, as influencer marketing sits under my wing of the house. It's been a great pleasure working with Vin, and hopefully, you'll see more of our stuff, over the next coming weeks with some of our product launches. But with that, I'm gonna dive right in. Definitely, Vin, jump in. Please, love to hear your commentary on this. I don't wanna be the one talking the entire time. I'm sure most people, if anything, are here to glean insights from your interactions with influencers. So with that, let's go. So I I think we've all heard this before. There's a new b to b buying reality. It feels like there's always a new b to b buying reality. And I think the facts are is that people just don't buy the way they used to. I pulled some of these stats that I I found. 81% of buyers have a preferred vendor at the time of first contact, and 85% of them already have an established purchase requirements before reaching out. Vin, I'm gonna just pause for a second and ask for your reaction to this just because I also have my thoughts from my own buying experience. But what do you think about this? Oh, that's so true. I mean, I spent prior to starting, the agency, I spent the last six years in b two b SaaS working in the ABM space. And so we were dealing with, you know, talking to marketers all day every day and there were some really big trends that we were seeing just like out in the field. One, more and more companies were investing more dollars into paid, so they were spending more and more on paid advertising year after year across the industry. But at the same time, as you mentioned, like, most buyers wanna shop anonymously. Right? So 80% of the buyer's journey is done anonymously. And so that leads to typically some poor results in terms of performance in the advertising front. And then from the sales perspective, I was a former sales guy. And then the past few years, I'm sure your sales teams can feel the struggle as well. Like, pipeline is, typically the thing that is most challenging right now, and it's because sales reply rates are at all time low. They're sitting at, like, one to 2% industry wide. And one, there's a lot of noise. AI helps is part of the cause of that. But also to, Cindy, your point, people wanna buy differently now. They wanna look into communities. They wanna look into trusted advisers. They wanna get referrals from friends. They wanna hear from their favorite, you know, creator online. And so that's a big proponent of, our conversation today. For sure. Funny enough, like, I was a previous Goldcast buyer and customer, and I always think about the ways in which I went about buying it. Right? So I don't even think we had, like, a solution in place. But we knew that with our virtual events, we, wanted a more robust, interactive, engaging platform. And sure enough, like you mentioned, like, I started asking people I knew, dropping notes into communities, like, what's everybody using? Our main use case was webinars. Right? And one of my, actually, like, childhood best friend happened to be at a company that had, like, multiple platforms in place, and she was like, if I had to pick one, I would just pick Goldcast. Obviously, like, I realize it's a little bit biased because now I sit on the Goldcast out of the house saying that. But all that to say, my research was primarily done, like, through word-of-mouth, probably also to some extent through social sharing. Right? And hearing that kind of feedback, I went into the buying process. Like, at the point in which I started requesting demos, I already kind of knew, like, this was the word on the street on these vendors. Right? So with that, I think it's important to also call out that, from one of the surveys I saw, 74% of b two b decision makers use social media to inform purse purchasing decisions. Obviously, you run a business bin that entirely, I'm sure, is influenced by this, but what are your thoughts on this? Yeah. I mean, there's even a we'll talk about it in a little bit as well, but there's even not just influencer marketing, but there's really different layers to it as well. So companies now looking to the CEO of that company, and to see what kind of messaging they lead with, like, what are their thoughts on the industry. So, like, not only are companies working with external or third party influencers, but, like, this is now a huge trend that's happening in house where employees are now becoming, like, in house influencers, and it really does start with the founder. For sure. So in this reality, I think we can probably all agree that winning mindshare is everything. Buyers now make decisions much, much earlier. I think the point in which they're requesting a demo, they've already decided, just just like the stat we saw two slides ago. They form our shortlist well before they're actively in the market. And so all that to say, you know, you gotta get in early, and you gotta be in their ecosystem. You gotta have that mental real estate, before they are at the point of evaluating vendors. Vin, any anything you wanna share here? No. I think, I I think being able to, like, go deep within a community is, like, super super important specifically within b two b, and I think, again, there's some examples of that that we'll go through. But, not only just having a relationship with someone just posting about you guys once, but also how are you guys showing up within that particular community? If you sell to content marketers, how are you showing up within the content marketing community? I think that's another big piece of it. For sure. Thank you. I think, actually, I'd love to share our first poll, responses. So interesting. How much of a focus is Mindshare marketing your current strategy? And it looks like, you know, 35% folks are still voting. It's a top priority, and they're exploring it. I'd be curious to know in the chat, like, for those that are exploring it, what what does that look like for y'all? Alright. I'm mostly curious because we here have a very strong point of view that the most effective way to win mind share is through video. At Goldcast, we obviously are all in on video. I know Vin's gonna jump in here and double down, double tap on why video, but video wins mind share. Mind share drives revenue. At the end of the day, if you're not, top of mind, you're you're forgotten, and so you're not part of the conversation. I think it's hard to win deals and drive revenue if you're not you're not in that that ecosystem. I'm gonna pass it over to Vin now to double tap on video. Yeah. So I'm sure this is, like, not new news, of course, but so LinkedIn is testing out this new video feed. They they released it. They pulled it back on some users. I'll clear the air here. I've been with the LinkedIn, like, product team a ton of times. Like, the LinkedIn video feed is is here to stay and they're, like, doubling down on it. There's actually a lot more innovations happening on LinkedIn that's coming out within the next few weeks around video. And that being said, they're really encouraging individuals to post video on LinkedIn. The challenge is is that there's actually only 1% of LinkedIn's users actually create content, and even a smaller fraction of that actually create video. So they have this video feed where, most people are consuming the video feed. They're not actually posting. So it's really this, like, content, deficiency problem where there's not enough content to show to its users. So if you're creating video content, there's actually a really big opportunity for you to get more of a reach than you typically would right now because LinkedIn needs to show your video to more users in order to, like, you know, keep everybody satisfied on the feed. And video since they uploaded this new feature, video uploads have been up 34%, so they are encouraging folks to to get on the platform. They're also encouraging other video creators from, like, Instagram and TikTok and YouTube to come on the platform as well. People are already already noticing a ton more videos. And videos actually get two x more engagement LinkedIn found. And I actually was, actually visited LinkedIn's office a few months ago, and I met with their video product team. And one of the things that they said was that a big theme on LinkedIn in in terms of getting your video prioritized is around knowledge share. So unlike TikTok where you might go for entertainment and things like that, LinkedIn is really, really on knowledge. How can you share knowledge about your job, about your role, about your career, anything that does provide value to your audience? And that's not to say that you can't have fun with it. A lot of really great creators are are doing, like, skits and parodies, but at the same time, they are still providing value. So that is the big trend and and I myself, really double down this as well. I would say, like, 60% of our revenue in our business comes from video content. And, yeah, so I'm excited to share some more use cases of some different things I've seen in the field. Alright. Let's get let's get into those use cases. So now we'll we'll move into a practical framework for winning mind share with influencer marketing. I know Vince put together a few case studies. Then I'll pass it back to you. Yeah. For sure. So I think the question, at least a lot of the conversations we have is, like, what type of content, like, should we even do with our influencers? That is a that is something to consider. Right? You don't just, like, you don't wanna just reach out to an influencer, have them think about the content, and just, like, forget about it. You wanna have some sort of strategy when working and reaching out to influencers. And so, one of the clients that we work with Storyline actually has this really great approach that crosses that that goes basically across the entire funnel. So their use case basically split to two. They have these kind of edutainment creators that are really creating a lot of the content for top of the funnel. There may be skit based, they're parodies, but they're still in line with the exact value prop of the company. For example, on the left hand side here, we worked with the creator Will Aiken who created, like, some parodies around, you know, buying b two b software. So challenging nowadays, seems like you have to talk to a BDR and AE, like, the whole team in order just to see a demo. And so he's basically relating that into real life scenarios like buying a car, buying a house. It's like you meet with the salesperson and, like, they don't actually show you the house or the car. And so that's just for really top of funnel. It's for awareness. Like, this video got over a million views and I think over a thousand likes. And then on the right hand side here is an example of more of a tactical video. Maybe it doesn't have as big of a reach, but we're working with, like, a actual practitioner, and they're sharing exact examples and, like, tutorial based type videos of how to use the tool. So that helps with performance. And and just like in advertising, the better your brand, is in terms of, like, your brand awareness, the better your ads perform because there's a familiarity with that. And so that's kind of the approach that we're seeing a lot of brands take. Another another, brand that's doing this really well is Clay. We don't work with them, but they do a really great job of creating this, like, really, you know, top of funnel, you know, episodic based content. And then they work with those practitioners that are creating a lot more of that non sexy, like, tactical content, and it seems to be working really well for them. You wanna move next next slide, Ben? Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. Right. The the other the other way of I think a lot of folks, when they think about influencer marketing, I think the traditional sense is like, hey. We just pay someone for a post, and that's it. But the goal here is, like, I wanna introduce some other ways to think about influencer marketing that are not just that traditional I pay you, you post relationship. Of course, the best the best relationships are more long term. But the other way you can use influencers are potentially using them for thought leader ads, which I can talk more about. We're gonna talk a little bit more about content distribution and how you can use influencers to help push, content that your team is creating and working really hard on. And then also having some, like, you know, having them promote your first party assets. So, like, you know, maybe joining your webinar or your podcast or contributing to your blog. But in this example, there might be a good opportunity to actually work with creators and actually just use their content for paid ads. So I maybe maybe that I bring this up, you guys will notice this now, but, I've noticed Intuit running a ton of ads. They're not a client that we work with, but I I I noticed a bunch of Intuit ads coming up over and over again. And so because I'm in the industry, I was curious. I'm like, what is going on here? Some of these creators actually are active on LinkedIn. Like, Christina on the left hand side here, she's actually active on LinkedIn. She's has a she's an entrepreneur. She runs, I believe, a SaaS product for creators. But then there's someone, like, I believe in the middle, Natalie, I believe. I think I clicked her profile and she had five LinkedIn connections. Five. I never met anyone on the planet that has five LinkedIn connections. So what's happening is they're basically finding creators that create really great content and are their basically, who look like their customers. For Intuit, they sell to small business owners. So they found somebody that owned a small business and also was really great at making content. And so they they basically got a video created on behalf of Intuit, had the creator post it, and then on the back end just ran it as an ad. So it doesn't necessarily matter if the creator even has followers. It just in this scenario, I'm talking specifically around the paid strategy, It really just matters if they they are your current customer, like, meaning, do they look like our customer? And two, can they make a compelling video? And so this is a really interesting strategy that I don't think honestly, a lot not a lot of b two b companies are actually doing this right now. So is this something I wanted to call out? Yeah. I it's funny because you when you brought up Clay earlier, I I thought about Sarah Sarah McNamara. I think she's one of their influencers, and, I followed her for a long time from a marketing ops perspective, and, like, it's it just makes a lot of sense. And, I mean, even even in the case where, like, they, like I hope they are paying her for her content. Right? I think her expertise and the fact that, you know, she's built such a following based around credibility. It's like, what she's saying, you know, is worth considering. And we obviously use Clay as well. And so any any kind of insights that we see, plays that we kinda run around through Clay, it's like the content is very, very interesting to me. Yeah. And I and I should've I'm sorry. I I didn't explain this. Elsa, put something in the chat. A thought thought leader ads is basically a an ad that you can run from your company page, but it's basically you're boosting a third party page. So it's coming from your ad account is what I mean. So let's just say Goldcast wanted to, run a thought leader ad on a post that I made about Goldcast. They basically the budget comes from the Goldcast ad account, but the ad comes from my post, Vin Matano's post. So it's like a boosted post. The reason you would do that is because, the these posts, they visually, they look like an organic post within the feed, and it's shown through the data that more, users will engage with a individual's post versus a branded, you know, a post coming from branded account. Cool. I'd love to take a moment here, to bring up our the results from our second poll that we ran. I might give it a second to load. Interesting to see who who's using video. Love that over oh, and we're still going. Over 40% are using video. That's so great. I think that's definitely the way to win here. I think in all the examples Ben's brought up, you can see the common theme there. Putting more of a focus and not yet. For those of you that that don't have the time or resources, I I have a product that I'd love to tell you about. Perhaps we will follow-up with you after. But thank you for participating in that poll. Alright. Let's move into content distribution. Yeah. This is this is like this is one of my favorite examples I've seen this year, and I'm sure people in the room, if you come from the content space or influencer space, you probably saw this. But another really smart way to use influencers is to help with content distribution. And and what I mean by that is a lot of in b two b, it's so funny. Like, in the consumer space, your goal is really, like, if I wanna sell this water bottle right here, like, we just wanna get sales on this water bottle. But b two b is a lot more complex. Right? And, you know, you can't just put your credit card in and buy, you know, hundred thousand dollars worth of Salesforce or, you know, whatever however much Salesforce cost. And so sometimes you will you wanna be able to provide value to a particular audience. And a way to do that and still not sacrifice performance is pushing some content assets that you already own. So Hootsuite, for example, they put all this time and energy into this big annual report. It's called the social media index report and they basically or benchmark report, and they basically put all this data from their customers, their clients, people in the field, influencers, thought leaders, and they compile this big dense report. And oftentimes, these reports that these companies put together, there's not really a value problem. They they're they're usually pretty valuable. There's all good information there. Oftentimes, it's a distribution problem. Right? It's kind of hard to promote this really dense data, like, ebook, basically. Right? It's not the most sexiest thing that people wanna download. So what Hootsuite did was they turned this, like, clunky, you know, kind of boring thing, turned it into this really big newspaper article that said, like, you know, breaking news, like, the, here's the best social media trends of 2024, or 2025. And they had the creators post all these basically pictures and holding a newspaper, and then in the text post was basically some of their key takeaways from that. And the CTA was like, hey. You guys can go check out check this out on your own time. And their CEO, actually was mentioned in a, Adweek article, and she said that across nine influencers, 60 six percent of all their downloads came from the social media campaign. And in seven days, it generated a million dollars in pipeline, which is crazy. But I think this is a really good example of, like, doing things that are already being done in the consumer space. Like, I'm a big nerd, and I consume a lot of content. This oversized newspaper, like, I can't there's probably over hundreds of, like, consumer companies that have done this trend. In the b to b space, though, like, it's so it's it's a lot easier to be an original because nothing has been done before. Is that a space is so green that them doing this trend with the newspaper actually was able to, like, stop people from scrolling, check out the the the benchmark report, and actually, like, download this thing. So this is one of my favorite examples, and and I encourage you, look in your content library. And, like, what content assets do you own that are, like, super valuable, but, like, we just maybe you haven't done much with them. That's a really great opportunity to have an influencer use that as a CTA. I I'm curious because, like, I love stats like this where, you know, you can tie a line between social media and pipeline. But this is also, like, I think I don't wanna say a trap, but the challenge that a lot of people have, right, when you go down influencer marketing. And, I mean, clearly, like, there was an impact in terms of winning mindshare, but what guidance do you have for folks where they're like I mean, because I think if you start, you know, presenting the stat, you're gonna have your CFO asking, like, when is when is the pipeline coming? Like, did that deal close yet? You know? And so how do you generally approach that? I mean, this is like the the the golden conversation that we have probably every single time. But I think at the end of the day, this does go back to, like again, in the consumer space, I can track if I share a link and you buy this water bottle, and, like, that's really the goal. But, like, in b two b, it's very it's much more complex. Right? You might have a PLG motion. You might be sales led. Like, Sydney, if you want a new SaaS tool for, like, your day to day, you might not even be able to buy it until a few months. It might have to go through procurement or security. And so I think, their clients we talk to, they always want brand brand awareness and performance, and oftentimes, those are both you know, there's a balancing act. I would say the clients that are looking, into ROI are really looking at the entire the entirety of all the efforts that are going on. So, like, you think of last touch attribution versus multi touch attribution. During this campaign, right, let's just say this campaign lasted one or two months or three months, maybe lasted a quarter. During that three month period, have we seen an uptick in website visits? Have we seen an uptick in maybe demos, like demo requests, I mean, like form conversions? Have we seen an uptick in LinkedIn followers? Like, those are all things that we should look at and, like, not not claim a %, like, hey. We did this a %. This is from this campaign. But, like, all of our efforts going on at once, the CEO posting, if we're running ads, maybe we're having, events taking place, maybe webinars like this. All of those efforts are leading to, you know, an uptick in in something, whether it's pipeline, web traffic, or purely just like impressions. Do you is ninety days kind of, like, the good rule rule of thumb for kinda tracking campaigns in your opinion? You know, I don't know if I have that answer. I will say most of our clients do start with a ninety day like a three like a three month campaign. What I've seen in the data with our clients, and maybe it's just because we are starting a lot with three month campaigns, is they typically see some sort of uptick, whether it's in demo requests or site traffic around month three and month four. Now I actually don't have enough data to say, hey. Compared to a six month campaign, the six month campaign is better. But like I said, most of our clients are, like, willing to start with a quarterly campaign. Yeah. I think that makes sense. I think it's also a lot more reasonable. I've definitely seen a lot of stats just for my own content consumption. Like, I think some people see it rolling even a year after. Mhmm. I mean, I know I'm still talking about some campaigns from probably, like, two years ago. Right? So I I think that's very interesting. Just, you know, to add my own kinda firsthand experience with this. At Goldcast, when we work with influencers, and then you can, you know, mention anything that I forgot. But we we use UTMs to track traffic. You know, there's definitely, firm ways to track direct KPIs for influencer marketing. But to Vin's point, it's very much a ecosystem type, surround type campaign. We're definitely not trying to see, okay, this person posted once, how many leads did we get from it or how many demo requests do we get? But in general, we're looking at it as a whole. Web traffic, if we're promoting an asset, downloads. Right? How did you hear about us is a format we love for sure. Yeah. I think I think that's super interesting. I love this this slide. Yeah. Me too. I'd say, like, one one of the other examples that that I see as a as a big trend, and this was just one that I that I grabbed because, I know this team well, but there's when you think of influence marketing, I mentioned earlier, you might think of, like, a third party or an external influence or someone that doesn't work at your company. However, there is a massive trend that's happening. Whether you wanna use the term employee generated content, EGC, whatever you wanna call it, There's a massive trend that I've I will say based on my experience, I think Gong has really popularized this. They really doubled down on, like, encouraging people to become, like, creators in house. I was gonna mention deal, but I thought that might be a sensitive time to mention them, but they do have a lot of, employees that create a lot of content. And so, one of the companies that we work with in terms of, helping with their influencer campaign, is called default. And so we help with the third the third party influencers. We help manage those those creators. But they actually have this insane, EGC strategy that starts with their founder, Nick or or Nico. Sorry. And, also their head of growth. And they basically just share, like, updates of the business. They share, like, things that are happening within the industry. Anytime there's a product update, like, their post get actually pretty great engagement where typically product posts, like, don't typically get good engagement. Like, hey. Check out this new product. But if it's coming from the founder, those typically get good engagement. And I spoke with Stan, their head of growth, and he said that 40 to 50% of all of their pipeline comes from their EGC efforts. And when they started the business, because they are fairly new, their first hundred thousand dollars came from their their CEO's LinkedIn presence, which is pretty crazy. So I, you know, I thought this was a really good example of, like, actually encouraging your employees to probably start creating content first. That's probably the easiest barrier to entry or the lowest barrier to entry. And then once you have that kind of a relationship established, each of those employees should have their own unique voice based on their role. So if Stan, their head of growth, his unique voice is how hit the product can help with his particular role. The the cofounder or maybe the COO, he may share how the product helps with his role, you know, or a salesperson on the team at default. Maybe they're sharing how default helps with their their sales and their outbound. And so that's something I would encourage. It's the easiest, lowest barrier to entry, and then start to work out, you know, look into those third party influencers. I'm gonna, try to get our audience some free consulting right now, Evan. So only because I see on the questions. If someone were to start this program, let's say, you know, going in order, what what top three things would you be like? These are the musts. For for for this slider here at EGC? Yeah. I would say start with the founder first. And I know, like, there's, like, a big a lot of founders are really not into this in creating content. They some of them may think they don't have the time. Some of them may think it's, like, silly and takes away from their role. If that's the type of founder that you do have, there's plenty of examples, of this succeeding. Honestly, I would look into, like, a a third party like Ghostwriter. There's a lot of those that exist out there, and they basically just help the founder create the content. So all the content is coming from the founder's mouth. The Ghostwriter just basically putting it into a written format and posting it for them. And and you would be shocked at how many founders that I know at least that actually use services like this, but I would always start with the founder. A lot of the companies that I'm now seeing a little behind the scenes from, they actually have a full team helping the founder create content. Like, that's how important this stuff is. And so if I was thinking about what type of content the founder should be creating, yes. Building public is definitely a buzzword, but it is something that it works time and time again no matter what industry you're in. People wanna know who they're buying from. They also wanna know, like, what exactly is going on in the business. Like, they will we wanna actually hear the wins. We wanna hear the losses. We wanna hear personal stories. That was one thing that stood out to me when we met with the LinkedIn video team was that, the content that does the best is where you're sharing, like, personal experience. So it could have been, like, who knows, ten years ago or something that's a story that you can share from ten years ago. Like, that stuff still works. It doesn't matter. So that's the type of stuff that works really well. Once you have that well oiled machine of, like, the CEO or the or the founder constantly creating content, then you wanna individualize those into specific roles and, start, like, also helping your employees become influencers. Like, put them on your webinars, put them on your podcast, give them a voice, and start to amplify them. And and and if any of these posts, like, perform well, start boosting their posts with paid ads, because, again, you're gonna help your employee. They're getting free impressions, free followers. Like, great. Like, who wouldn't want that? And then also, you're also kind of helping create a new voice out of your employees. And so that's how I would kinda get started with that and then make sure they're departmentalized. And what I mean by that is, like, if you have a sales persona, talk about sales use case, marketing, marketing use case, ops ops use case, etcetera. Only because I know I've asked this question probably many times early on, but what I think people always wonder, like, how polished do things need to be? Like, do you need, like, the full setup? You know? We're obviously talking about posting content and leveraging video here. Yeah. Yeah. So that's actually a really good question. So I would say my biggest recommendation is, like, invest in a good audio. Like, invest in a good microphone more than anything. If you're just getting started with video, like, if they actually found, like, it's okay if your camera quality is not that great. Honestly, invest in a good microphone. People would actually watch a video if the if the video quality is poor, but the microphone if the audio is good. Invest in a good microphone and film. And if you did wanna do video, film in front of a a natural light, like a big light, window, I mean. And that's the easiest thing. You don't need to invest into any I literally grew to, like, back when I was creating, like, content more aggressively on on TikTok, I grew to 20,000 followers on TikTok with an iPhone 10. And this was, like, two years ago when, like, the iPhone 15 was out or whatever, or whatever iPhone was out. So you don't need anything fancy. I slowly upgraded, and, I do use the camera now and I do use some lights and stuff like that, but that's after making content for, like, five years. The biggest thing I would say is worry about the story, so really focus on storytelling. Write the script ahead of time before you record. Don't just turn your camera on and just start, like, rambling. Write the script, focus on the story, get a good mic. I think that's probably, like, pretty underrated, and film in front of a a big window. That's how you get started. Awesome. I think audio is what I heard and audio script and just get started. I think those are core core things to give you a good start for sure. Alright. I wonder do we wanna take some questions right now before we go into Mythbusters? What do you think? Let's do it. Yeah. I think so. I think let me see. I see Jake's question. Actually, let me go to q and a. So one of the first questions I see is, what tools would you recommend for smaller marketing teams trying to create? Sydney, maybe I think I might pass that one to you. I think you have a pretty good, knowledge on, on tools in this field. On tools for creating video content? I mean, I'm I'm obviously biased. Right? So, I I would recommend you try out Content Lab for sure. I think I've actually talked, recently at one of the shows I was at, folks that already have, like, a pretty active webinar program, have a lot of content. And my conversation with them is always, you know, what are you doing to repurpose that content? And we have a forever free trial. So I encourage you to try that out. It's so easy to use. But I I mean, I think there's there's no shortage of tools. That's, like, the thing. It's, like, such a crowded space out there. I'm curious. I know there's, like, a lot of folks in here that are doing it. I'm curious, like, what what tools everyone else is using. I I use Final Cut Pro for just, like, pretty much all my video editing, but I think to your point, if if you are creating content like this, like, being able to distribute, you know, break up that content to multiple, like, assets, whether it's a a blog or multiple short form is, like, very, very important. But if you're just looking to, like, just to create one, like, some video vertical, one minute video, Final Cut Pro, if you have a Mac, you pay for it once, you own it forever, and it's pretty beginner friendly, and I still use it to this day. Awesome. I I'm gonna take a minute to just scroll through some of the other questions. Okay. Here's another good question. How do you find content creators to work with? Yeah. The age old question. I think there should be, again, idea of, like, what you actually want out of this campaign, though. Right? So a lot of creators are gonna be diff good at different things. Some creators are creating more episodic content or skits or parodies that are a little more creative. You're not gonna have them do a demo. Some creators on LinkedIn, like, don't do video at all, which is a big missed opportunity for them. But some some just do text. I have some creators that just make carousels, literally carousels, and they do really well. So you have to identify, like, okay. Do we want this campaign to be, like, filled with video content? Do we want, like, we maybe we have a new product coming out, we just want reach. Probably wanna find a bunch of video creators. Maybe it's an ongoing campaign and we just want these, like, you know, practitioners to share tactical, you know, walk throughs of our tool. Okay. We gotta find the appropriate creator. So that's the first thing you need to establish. Right? The next thing I would do is look into specific communities. Right? So in in b two b, like, the niches are so important. People can argue all day long. I stand on the hill that, like, niches are, like, the most important thing. In the consumer space, like, again, going back to the water bottle, I wanna sell this water bottle. Maybe I'm just looking from males between the ages of, I don't know, 25 and 40. Any male can buy this. Heck, a female can buy this. Anyone can buy this water bottle. In b two b, you can't even go just, like, marketing. That's too broad. You have to go, like, even further down. Like, if you have a tool where you just sell to a particular persona that's your, like, power user, well, you should go go into those communities. Like, we have a company that we work with. Well, the the company default on the screen here, they sell to RevOps. That's that's their main persona. So what do we do? We dive into the RevOps community. Now as you can imagine, there's not like a huge merging market of RevOps creators, but there are thought leaders within that community that people look to for advice within the industry, and we work with them. Now if you wanted to get more reach, maybe I'm gonna go a little bit outside that community, and try to find someone just in the go to market space, but maybe they're making skits or content. So that's the first thing I would do, and then also look within your customer base to see if you can get any customers instead of doing, like, a testimonial. Like, have them just make a LinkedIn post. You could run that as a thought leader ad. These are really good ways to, like, just easily get started. Yeah. And just from the like, how we tend to do it here, obviously, for growth marketing, we have a lot of, you know, personas we're trying to get in front of. And I think how we kinda think about that is, like, who who are the people we wanna get in front of, and who do those people tend to listen to? And, like, LinkedIn is definitely one of our main channels for sure. And so looking at I mean, one, either asking in these communities like, hey, rev ops, for example, like, you know, who do you follow if if you're looking for rev op rev ops advice. Right? And usually when you, like, land on a couple of those names, you tend to see that, like, most influencers in the same space interact with each other anyways. And so you'll see that, you know, like, Sarah, I've mentioned a couple of times already. But like, Sarah, like, the folks who engage with Sarah's post most likely are rev ops professionals. And so we'll tend to just look that way, and then look at you know? We're gonna get into a, like, follower account, engagement, that kind of stuff, to assess whether we think they would, you know, amplify the message, well to the our target personas. Yeah. I know. Yeah. You have something else to add? No. I'd say I agree I agree with that. Cool. I'm gonna move us into Mythbusters, one of my favorite things. I just like I think nothing unites folks, like, when there's a wrong a wrong thing. You know? And everyone's like, no. That's wrong, and, like, jumps in. But, in the spirit of influencer marketing, and winning mind share, I'm gonna start with the first one. I think everyone I think I hear it a lot. Like, influencer success is all about follower count. And I think maybe even when I first started, I'm like, well, they don't have the right followers. Their followers are so low. Vin, you've educated us more times than once on, you know, the concept of micro and micro and macro influencers. So, would love to just hear you chime in here and correct us all. I'll say this. I think, follower count is one of the main stats that's just, like, losing less and less importance over the years, especially on LinkedIn and especially if you sell into sales, marketing, and even HR. LinkedIn obviously didn't start as, like, a this attention to be a social platform. Right? So I was a former sales guy. I added so many people. So a lot of salespeople, HRs, h people in HR because they're recruiting and, like, doing a bunch of interviews, people in marketing, they typically have a ton of connections. And those connections lead to followers, but oftentimes, those are not true followers. They're not gonna be someone that's supporting you, know what you're up to, buy from you. So they you kinda have this inflation of just, like, a very high follower count. You could just add a bunch of people and connect with a bunch of people. That will lead to followers. And that that's not really a good indication of if you have an engaged audience. So what we look for when we look for creators, we'll look at the follower count. Sure. I think that's something to at least pay attention to. But really what we look for is, like, total engagement. Are people commenting on the post? Are they having discussion within the post? If you look through the comments and there is, like, actual discussions happening in the comments, that's how you know you have an influencer with a really great audience. Right? Because I I mean, I've even run into this too where we work with an influencer that has so much followers, and we work with them, and the campaign just flops. Right? So you really gotta be meticulous to see, like, does this person have, like, going back I don't know if you guys ever hear the expression of, like, a thousand true fans. Mhmm. You know, the the argument is that you don't need a million followers to be successful. You just need a thousand true fans. A thousand true fans has come on that will fly across the country to meet you at an event. They will buy whatever you put out. They will subscribe to a list. Whatever you do, they will follow along, and all you need is a thousand people that, like, really rock with you. And that's what we're looking for when when reaching out to influencers. It's kinda funny because, when you were talking about that, it, like, reminds me of Amazon reviews where, like, if they just have an absurd amount, you know, like, hundreds of thousands of positive reviews, at some point you're like, this doesn't seem legit. Like, I I know for me now, I I can't even trust, like, Yelp or Amazon reviews just because I'm like, it's just inflated. I don't know which ones are legit, which ones were, like, you know, bots putting it in. Yeah. Social media. Alright. Myth number two. Influencer marketing is just paying for endorsements. Yeah. I I mean, I think we we definitely, like, talked about this. Right? I think there's there's a lot of ways we can use in and it should be a mutual partnership with the influencer and the brand. Sure. Every once in a while, maybe you do need to get a certain message out, and you can work with influencers to do that. That's okay. You don't have to be shameful of that. I think there's a really good analogy that I did not create, but I've heard and it and it really resonated with me of this idea of window content and mirror content. So when you work with the creator, there's two types. Right? Most of the time, it's gonna be window content where you're allowing the creator to see your product through their window, through their lens. They're gonna basically talk about the product how they want. They're gonna come up with their own content. And then the other times, every so often around big product releases or something that need there's some big news, you're gonna have mirror content. And that's where you kind of give them a little bit more to, hey. We kinda need you to say this. We have this new product coming out. We'd love if you just mentioned that. And every so often, you kinda have that. And, yes, sometimes it is just an endorsement. But oftentimes, the best influencer marketing partnerships are when, it is a long term partnership. And whether you start off in a small agreement, that's totally fine to test it out. Once you see that success in the campaign, definitely offer a long term agreement to creators because what's gonna happen is they're gonna be more loyal to you guys. They're very active within communities that you don't know about. They're gonna be the ones recommending you guys. Anytime you need somebody like an influencer, whether it's joining a webinar or attending your event or some last minute thing, you have someone now you can kinda tap into. And so that's the that's the part where you really wanna get into this this mutual agreement. And for the creator, it's it's great because, you know, if you enter a long term relationship with a creator, you know, now they're getting some just steady income from this brand, and they also get to be deeper within the community and learn more about the product if they're actually seeing benefit in it. So, they're definitely not just endorsements, although that is that is part of it. I I and I won't shy from the fact that that is part of it. And there's a lot more ways you can use them. They can join your webinars, like I said, help with content, etcetera. Yeah. I'll just add that. I think in in some of these cases, I've seen it for sure with our customer base. Like, people naturally are already creating content about your product and talking about it. And so in some of these engagements, it's really, like what Vin mentioned, it's like using them more as a thought leader, you know, from that ad perspective. It's like it's it's you're not even really contracting with them to say that. It's you're contracting with them to, like, amplify what they've already said organically on their own. But, yeah, I think I think this is it it reminds me a lot of Instagram when when I think of, like, this type of myth that goes around. But, I just having worked in it now, I'm like, no. There's it's content you're already consuming, and oftentimes, it's just like an amplified message of that content. Yeah. And vice versa. Sometimes it's already content the creator is gonna be creating. Right? So Yeah. It goes both ways. Like, for example, we work with that power dialer tool. A lot of the sales creators, they make cold calling content. So just, hey, keep doing your cold calling content, but incorporate the power dialer. You start to hear. We'll give you this tool. You can make a hundred more dials. There's already content you're gonna make. So, yeah, it goes both ways. Yep. Alright. Next one. Just let influencers do their thing. I definitely kind of maybe, jumped the gun on my answer on the last one. But, yeah, going back to that mirror versus window content, there are times where you wanna help the influencer maybe come up with the content or or give a little bit more direction than you normally would. Most of the times, you kinda wanna have at the end of the day, the influencers are gonna know how to talk to their audience best. But that's not to say that you shouldn't be involved in the process. So with all of our clients, we have a, like, approval process. So the creator needs to send us their content before going live. Now what that does is that doesn't allow us to go in there and just change everything up, but it allows us to go in there and just be like, okay. Great. They talked about the the things that they agreed to talk about, and that looks great. And, also, maybe they're not you know, We don't we don't need anyone mentioning competitors or bad mash bad mouthing competitors, so we just, like, kinda check before going live. So I highly recommend in the consumer space, every single influencer campaign, there is an approval process before the content goes live. In the b two b space I'm learning, that standard has not been set. So we're trying to do the best job we can to set that standard because it is an important part of the process. You don't want to ruin any, like, risk of tarnishing your brand reputation, but it really should just be like a a quality check versus, like, oh, I'm gonna go in and change this entire thing. So that's that's what I'll say on that. Yeah. I think there's a lot of, like, power in a brief, right, as well. I think that really is more of a guideline than anything. Our CMO, Kelly, actually posted about a campaign we ran in the fall, around an event called Content Resurrection, but we had influencers, we had tarot cards made for influencers. I'll try to find the link for her post and drop it in, but she broke down the whole play and kind of like how we interacted with influencers, the extent in which we guided the content development process. But for the most part, we just asked that they, you know, use their product use our product to, use our product, record themselves, and then kinda post their feedback about it, on LinkedIn. And so I I know I that was when I first joined, and so I thought it was the coolest thing. But I also heard from, like, other people I knew in the space that, it was a really cool campaign that they saw as well. Let's I'll try to find the link while we jump to the next Netbuster. Okay. So the next one is post it and forget it. What do you think about this one? Post it and forget it. No. Definitely not. That's not a good strategy. I think, going back to, like, being part of a community, it's really important actually to, like, comment and engage on other things. It's also important to kinda monitor these posts to make sure that well, if you're if you're spending a lot of time and energy and money, of course, trying to get a an influencer to post something, we wanna see how it's performing as well. We also wanna see what kind of comments are happening in the post, and that sometimes will kind of lead to more product feedback or messaging feedback sometimes. And then also on top of that, you want the influencers to really be engaged in that community as well. So, like, if someone randomly makes a post about, content platforms, well, we hope the Goldcast influencers, since we're working with them for so long, we hope they would engage in that conversation and recommend Goldcast. And then, like, from a creator standpoint, me as a creator, I know how important it is to comment and show love on other people's content because they reciprocate it. And especially if you're in this community, you wanna make sure you're being active in this community. So it's very important. What you don't spend all day on LinkedIn. Believe me, that could happen if you let yourself. But, like, man, just set, like, ten, fifteen minutes each day to, like, make sure you're engaging with the comments. I think Sprout Social recently released a stat that was, like, 73% of consumers say they'll buy from a competitor if you don't respond to the comments, which is crazy. So, yeah, we definitely wanna make sure we're, like, engaging and not ignoring the community. For sure. I think that I think the post it and forget it is, like, the biggest trap. I think a lot of people think once you hit, like, publish, you're good to go, and it's just so much more than that. Mhmm. I think I've even kind of don't wanna say I'm judgy, but, like, when I see posts and there aren't any comments or actions, I'm kinda like, okay. Like You're less likely to engage again. Yes. For sure. Yeah. So I'm gonna go to the last myth Mythbuster just because I wanna, save some time for actual q and a. The last one is, a successful, you know, influencer marketing engagement is views and likes. This this definitely varies. So this could be true if you really are looking purely for impression based. Like, I think some of the brands we do work with that are taking budget out of brand for this, they are looking at CPMs actually. Like, you know, that maybe they're spending around $30.40 dollars CPM on LinkedIn ads, and they're comparing it to an influencer campaign. One of our most successful clients is averaging, like, an $11 CPM. And for purely brand plays, like, that's that's success. That's that's how we define it, but not all the customers are the same. Right? Some customers really wanna focus on sign ups and referrals. So it does depend on the campaign. But before you engage with influencers, like, be very clear on what the goal of the campaign is. Like, you don't wanna engage with an influencer and then, like, they don't really know what they're supposed to do either. Like, are they posting? Are they trying to get people to sign up? What's the CTA? Going back to what Sydney said, like, a good brief consult for all this. Identify what the goal is early. If no one knows about you guys, we have a good product, maybe you wanna focus on brand awareness. If you guys are pretty dominant in the industry and I don't know. If you're looking for more sign ups, okay. Great. Let's create a system where we can get people to, you know, download or take action somewhere. So it it definitely does depend. Yeah. I think just to echo what you're saying, there's you know, it it's what are you trying to achieve. Right? At the end of the day, like, I realized we all work at companies and we're trying to impact pipeline and revenue, but I think it's a lot to I mean, don't get me wrong. There are cases where it's a product launch. Right? And straight up, like, we're trying to create, awareness around that product launch, and we are gonna look at website visits to that product page, demo requests for that product specifically. But then, you know, for other things where you're just trying to create a movement around things, it's not you're not gonna really, like, do a splash and then see demo requests necessarily. Okay. With nine minutes left, I'm gonna move us into q and a. Stop sharing my slides. One of the questions I thought would be interesting, because I'm also curious on your thoughts, Ben, is are there ways to, like, provide mutual value exchange beyond payment? Like, have you seen because because the easiest, right, is to, like, contract a post for this amount of money. Like, what are some other creative ways, that you can think of or that you've seen work well? Or is it that's really the main way? No. No. No. For sure. I mean, like, we actually have helped a few brands on their, like, physical event strategy. So what we basic like, for example, we have an, an event happening, not us, but there's an event happening next week in Vegas, the Zendesk, Relate Summit or something like that. And we're sending a creator that talks about CX to the conference with that brand. Now for the creator, like, they're pumped. Like, they, you know, they don't wanna have to spend a bunch of money to fly out to Vegas, stay there, like, the travel's covered. They get to go to this conference for free and network and, like, create content at that event if they choose to do so. And for the brand perspective, it's a win for them because now they have, like, someone that is known within the industry repping their shirt, whether they give them a swag or they're at their booth or at all their events or happy hours. So, like, that's something that we're helping with too, and that creator is now doing, like, street interview at that at that event. So, like, there's other ways you can amplify the creators. Like, if you're hosting an event, maybe there's a physical, conference that you host every year at user conference. Like, invite those influencers on stage to speak. They're really interested in that stuff, and just just really making sure you're amplifying their voice too. So, like, if the content's working really well, like, maybe promise to boost some of their posts. Like, they would they believe me. Creators would love that, because they're getting, like, their free followers and basically free engagement. So there's it's definitely mutually beneficial, and then plus they also can get tied into a new community as well. So, like, Clay, for example, a lot of their influencers is in, like, this group chat, this or or Slack community, and they're sharing all their use cases for Clay. And now they're learning from experts on how to do these Clay workflows. And that's a benefit. Like, that's pretty attractive to join something. If you're in that space and you need to learn how to how to use Clay, you'd probably wanna join that influencer program because you can see how the top people are doing it. So those are some examples that I've seen. Awesome. Thank you. This one's a a long one, but I think it's important to touch on. What type of considerations do you recommend before amplifying a third party post? Like, do you suggest or have guidelines on who to boost? Is it just using best judgment? I know you've touched on a few, you know, things you look at, but let me know what you think here. Yeah. I would personally, I'd recommend someone that is creating video content because video does perform better for paid efforts. The cool thing is you actually can have the so this is like a little, recommendation here. You could have the creator post. Maybe maybe at the time you're focused on brand and there's no there's simply no CTA. Maybe you're just like, this creator posted a really cool video, whatever. That video has maybe a two week shelf life for organic reach, let's say, on average. After that two weeks is done and you say, hey. That post was great. They talked about our brand the right way, yada yada. You can have the creator go back and edit the post. You can edit any any LinkedIn post. You can have them change up the text and include a CTA, like a firm CTA. Like, hey. Go check out our new benchmark report or go see a demo. Whatever your CTA is that you decide, then you can boost those posts. And make sure the creator you're boosting, like, you know, I'm sure if you already worked with them as an influencer, you've already checked out their profile. But, like, just double check their profile because you are you have to remember, you are paying for traffic to go to them instead of your brand. So just double check that. Make sure that the influencers kind of they're they're talking about stuff that you feel appropriate that they're talking about. If they work with competitors, that's a sticky situation too. You don't wanna boost a post, and then the next day they they work with a competitor. Now, you know so that's something you those are the small things you wanna look out for. Awesome. Thank you. I'm curious. What's your take on hashtag ad on thought leadership content? Well, you need to do it. It's, by law. So have we Like, has it impacted? You know? I I'm like it doesn't at first, I feel like for me as a user, I was like, oh, okay. These are paid ads. But now I personally am like, that's nice to know that it's an ad, but, like, I don't know that it even registers with me anymore, that it's paid. Yeah. The FTC just states that you need to disclose that there is a transaction happening. Basically, it paid for for services. Now you can just you don't need to necessarily say hashtag ad, but it just it needs to be disclosed somewhere. So you can say something like, I've partnered with Goldcast. You can you can literally write that, and that's okay. You don't need to write hashtag ad. You can you can maybe do, like, hashtag Goldcast partner. LinkedIn even has a brand partnership toggle that does look a little bit less obvious, I would say, but it is built into the LinkedIn platform, so it's it's it's something they encourage. So you have to do it. In my experience, it does not impact the performance of the post. We have posts that do super well that are ads. Now when the creator gets super lazy and the post is just a lazy post, yeah, sure. They're gonna see some sort of impact. So it's it's really about how you're working with the influencers and, you I I think the biggest misconception I don't know if this is part of the Mythbusters thing or not, but, like, adding links to the post and doing ad or brand partnership does not impact your post. I have plenty of examples of posts that have millions of impressions where they included a link, brand partnership toggle was on, and they put ad, hashtag ad. So as long as the content's good, this does not impact it. What what do you know if the content's good? That's like I, like, personally, I'm always like, does this still matter or not? Like, I don't know. The link in comments, but it's nice to know that you actually have data to support that it doesn't matter. Logan has a question around buy in. I'm gonna bring that up. How do you get leadership buy in to spend coveted marketing budget on influencers? Logan, if you had this answer, I would, I would I would pay for it. I I mean, going back to, like, I think, like, just my sales roots, I think you have to really determine, like, why is why are we having this conversation? So, like, most of the time, if we ever get in you know, when we get inbound, I don't necessarily think we're talking to, like, marketing leadership. Sometimes we're talking to, you know, the the the practitioner. Right? And so, you know, it's it really goes down to, like, why are we having this conversation? What is the problem that you're trying to solve? If it's because, hey. We have this really great product and, like, no one knows about us, then we need to convey to the team that, hey. We need to get we need to increase our awareness here. I also like to show examples of maybe competitors that are already doing this stuff. And, you know, the challenge now, I think, like, the biggest trend that I'm seeing, like, in the data space, like, take ZoomInfo, for example, They've just it seems like they're just, you know, paying a lot of, top creators. You know, there there's some content going out, but it does seem like they have these creators, in this agreement. So other brands, you know, can't work with them in terms of, like, a competitive standpoint. So that that could be important too if a lot of your competitors are working with influencers that's now shrinking the influencer pool for you guys to work with. And that can create a lot of urgency internally as well. And there's plenty of data that shows that the influencer marketing is impactful, but maybe just, you know, in order to get the executive team to have buy in, maybe we need to show them some examples of, like, other players in the space that are doing this and are seeing results. But it is it is it is a challenging conversation for sure. Like, it's definitely not something that's easy. Yeah. The last thing I'll add on that is, how I kind of look at influencer marketing is and I I've honestly had to come around to it as well, but with growth marketing, demand gen, performance marketing, like, we're we're spending money on ads. And the end goal of that is, like, trying to reach a target audience. Right? And so, you know, I'm I'm thinking through, like, especially if you've been running ads for some time and, you know, the frequency is already there, like, it might be time to try something new. And so this is I'm sure at some point, this probably started out as an experiment for a lot of folks. Right? But at the end of the day, to me, it's like trying to get in front of the right people, and this is the way in which you do it best. With that said, we are at time. Thank you so much, to Vin, my cohost here, partner in crime. This was so much fun. You're my first webinar of this year, as I mentioned to you earlier. It was such a blast. And thank you to everyone, who stuck around to the end. The recording, will be available after this event, and we will be reaching out to the lucky winners. But, stay tuned for our our next event, which we will be following up with you shortly via email. So thank you so much. Thanks, Vinh. Hope you have a great day. I'll be talking to you soon. Thanks, guys.