The Case for Influencer Marketing in B2B with Brianna Doe (Founder at Verbatim)

Hey, it's Dave.

Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at Optimizely. Optimizely is the AI platform built for modern marketing teams, helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences, and optimize your website, all powered by Agentic AI. I wanna be the person on my team who actually knows how to build with AI, not just talk about it, not just use Claude to ask silly questions, but I want real output, something I can point to and say, I built that and it saved my team hours every week. If you wanna be that person, check out this resource. The team at Optimizely is super smart in this area and they've developed a new AI marketing certification called Opal U. It's a 5-day live course designed for senior marketing leaders who are ready to ship more with AI. This is a structured hands-on program with just 1 hour a day for 5 days where you'll build 3 real AI agents that saves 10 hours a week. Plus you're gonna learn 5 prompt engineering techniques that actually produce usable output. How to feed your agents the right context so they write and think like you, how to connect them to real data sources so they're pulling from what actually matters to your business. And you'll do all of this alongside 50 other senior marketing leaders just like you dealing with the same challenges. And at the end, you'll present what you built, get feedback, see what others created, and leave with 10 new ideas for what to build next. Plus, 20% of Opal U graduates have gotten a promotion or a new job after completing this.

That's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool.

So now's the time. Check it out. Opal U kicks off every Monday. You can apply right now. Optimizely.com/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a shout out to the team at Vector for sponsoring this episode. Vector is a contact-level ads platform. Look, you probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people that you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping that the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. And they just launched their MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude and ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Which ad creatives are fatiguing right now? Which companies are engaging but not converting? Which actually driving pipeline right now? What new ideas should we be running? This is an amazing way to use AI and Vector together. It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Head to vector.co to learn more. That's V-E-C-T-O-R.co. And if they ask you how you heard about them, tell them Exit Five, please. See ya. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Exit Five. 1, 2, 3, 4. Exit Five. 1, 2, 3, 4. Exit Five. 1, 2, 3, 4. Exit Five.

Hey, it's Dave. Quick note on this one. This is conversation with Brianna Doe. She was a super popular speaker at DRIVE 2025, and she's returning this year for DRIVE 2026 with more Where That Came From. So we're gonna run this episode back. Brianna is the founder of Verbatim, an award-winning influencer marketing agency, and she spent 15 years helping B2B brands figure out how to actually make influencer marketing work. Her session gets into why most companies treat influencer marketing like a vending machine, put money in and expect to get leads out. And that's exactly why it fails. She also covers how to structure a 90-day pilot without blowing your budget, why follower count is mostly a distraction, and how to get leadership bought in before the campaign launches, not after it flops. If your influencer marketing strategy isn't built around a place where trust already exists with your buyers, you're probably just shouting into the void. I know a lot of you are focused on influencer marketing right now, and Brianna's great at talking about it, so enjoy this session.

All right.

I love this theme. A lot of stuff about social media. We talked a lot about there isn't social media and marketing anymore. Social media is the way to do marketing. The thing that Harry mentioned about what Ramp is doing when I asked him about posting that, I think that's the way that companies need to operate today is let's post something organically on social, see what works, and then we can decide to spend and do more of that. And this next person has a, has a, a somewhat related topic and I love this. So we've been talking a lot about the power of in-person. I first met our next speaker by chance. I got sat next to her at a, at a dinner in New York a couple years ago. And, uh, now she's here to take our stage and make the case for influencer marketing in B2B. She spent 14 years helping brands from scrappy startups to household names stand out in a crowded feed. She's the founder of Verbatim, an award-winning influencer marketing agency. She's also an influencer strategist who's worked across B2C and B2B and a LinkedIn creator herself. If you don't already follow her, giving her a true 360-degree view of influencer marketing. Please give a warm welcome at Drive to the great Brianna Doe.

Hi. How are you?

Well.

Have fun.

Thank you.

You can hear me through that?

Yeah.

You know what's funny? Can everybody hear me? Can you hear me?

Yeah.

I've been asked maybe 37 times today if I'm nervous, and I was like, no, no, no, not nervous at all. Everybody in this audience is somebody that I respect so deeply and I feel like I'm gonna black out.

So—

Wait, wait, wait. We got— let's give her some noise. Let's go. You got it. Let's go.

You're good.

So first things first. Hi, I'm Brianna Doe. Like Dave said, I work in influencer marketing, have for a long time. Our clients are a mix of B2C e-commerce, sustainability, nonprofits. And B2B SaaS. And honestly, I just love influencer marketing. I was doing it long before I ever started creating content. I think it's a very misunderstood market and I think a lot of us do it really badly. So very excited to chat about this today. Quick pulse check. Who here has run an influencer or creator-led program before? Just raise your hands.

Okay.

Keep your hands up if you would call it successful. Okay, awesome. Another question. Who here has purchased has purchased a product, B2B or B2C, based on content they saw from an influencer? Amazing. I do it daily. So awesome.

Damn.

Yeah, I'm very, very, very gullible, very easily influenced. So I'm a marketer. We love our stats. First things first, influence marketing is not optional anymore. We can debate about it afterwards, but for the sake of this, it's really not. First things first, 84% of B2B buyers rely on peer and industry leader recommendations. 75% of B2B leaders research products after engaging with thought leadership content. And 87% of B2B buyers give more credence to content featuring industry experts they trust. And the thing is, I'm preaching to the choir, but B2B buying behavior is not linear at this point. People aren't just Googling, "What's the best CRM?" or "Best employee engagement platform?" and then calling it a day and choosing the first option that pops up. They're piecing together insights from LinkedIn DMs, comments from their peers, industry leaders they respect. They're piecing all of that together, Slack communities, for example, and that's where their influence lives. So if your strategy doesn't meet them where trust already lives and exists, you might as well be invisible. I really just wanna talk about Love Island. So lessons we can borrow from B2C. First things first, the one on the left, we have Amelia Dimoldenberg. If anybody watches Chicken Shop Dates, she interviews celebrities. She recently partnered with Bumble to do a full-fledged campaign. And D2C brands win because they don't just hand creators a script, they hand them a seat at the table. So with her, this campaign was impeccable, right? It wasn't a brand trying to borrow her audience. It was Bumble already leveraging the trust that she's built and leveraging the voice that she manufactured as well. The content leaned into her style, it leaned into her humor. She talks about being single. She talks, she flirts with her celebrity guests. Mm-hmm. And that's why it worked. It wasn't just about the delivery, she was part of the architecture. And when you let creators shape the narrative instead of handing them a brief and saying, "Write this, post it like an ad," the campaigns feel alive because they actually are. Any Love Island fans in the room?

Woo!

Yeah? Oh my gosh, so few. Okay. Well, second one, Love Island USA took the world by storm this summer. Nick and Elandria were a couple that came out of that. Purpose here, what happened is there were so many jokes, so many, cultural moments created from their relationship. And a big one was a lip combo that Elandria wore every day, became a whole thing. And so she partnered with a brand called NYX right after Love Island ended, and it sold out in about 2 hours. They saw the wave and they jumped on it. They didn't force the trend. They didn't try to manufacture the experience. They kind of rode the wave that this couple was already creating and rode that all the way to a sellout.

Wow.

Finally, short-term sparks and long-term plays. Final question I'll ask. Gap, Cat's Eye ad, anybody?

Yeah.

Okay. So for context here, we also had the Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle ad, which I think is a good juxtaposition, right? Not aligning with your customer base, not really aligning with the demographic juxtaposed against Gap, who partnered with Cat's Eye, a diverse multicultural girls group 20 million views on YouTube. I think 15 million of them are me, but they did incredibly well. And there's been— the thing is with them too, it's not just that they sold a lot of jeans or that the ad went viral. This became a trend all on its own. If you get on TikTok and look this up, you'll see creators recreating the dance, wearing new Gap jeans that they've bought. It's taking on a life of its own. And so there's this mix between, okay, we have this one moment that we can capture, this one ad that won't— Oh, live on in perpetuity, but how can we turn that into a trend that actually transcends time and to an extent transcends culture? So how do we actually do this with B2B? That's great, we're not selling lip combos, right? It's not as interesting necessarily. There are a few main things to consider before we dive into actually implementing this yourself. There's so many ways to partner with influencers outside of just sponsored posts. I will say this plays a lot into your budget, right? If you're a lean startup, if you're new, if you're testing this for the first time, You're probably not gonna get $100,000 to build out a full influencer program or campaign, but you can leverage different types of content. So we have the most straightforward point of view-led LinkedIn content. This can be product explainers, this can be product walkthroughs, this could be just content that talks about how they're implementing it into their tech stack, whatever the case may be. We also have YouTube explainers and deep dives, webinars, conferences, creator-led activations where brands are—

Yeah.

Co-hosting events with creators. They're just co-creating these experiences together instead of trying to own it on their own. Podcast partnerships, co-branded content, niche communities, and multichannel activations. So when you pair sponsored LinkedIn posts with long-term webinar series and YouTube explainers. All right, that's all great. We love it. But how do you actually do this for yourself, right? So the way I break this down, I call it the creator engine. Came up with that name myself, so you're welcome. First tier is discover and co-create. So before you do anything, before you engage with a single influencer, before you sign any contracts, you need to understand what success actually looks like. And I think a lot of the time, you know, what I see when I was in-house and now working with clients, you kind of create this in a silo. You decide what success looks like. You're not really talking to the sales team or product or CS to get their point of view.

Yes.

You're probably talking to your leadership team, but I would venture to say that for a lot of folks and for a lot of marketers, there is gonna be a disconnect between what success looks like. You run a campaign, it goes great, you get 500,000 impressions, and then your CMO asks you how many leads you generated, how much revenue you generated, and the answer doesn't match up, right? So before anything else, dial in your KPIs, dial in your metrics for success, and dial in the campaign parameters as well. If this is a one-time test or a 3-month test, Like, how are we actually gonna refine along the way? How do we make this more than just a static campaign? And next, then you can start integrating creators into the process early. And what I like to say too is, you know, I get a lot of questions about budgets. Like, how do I know how much influencers are gonna charge? How do I know if I can afford it? You can ask them. You can, you can reach out to them. I actually have—

Like, there's supposed to be some like spreadsheet, like some database with like everyone's rate in there. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well, I mean, unfortunately with LinkedIn especially, They don't like us having any data. So you gotta build it on your own, but you can just ask them, right? And you can build your own spreadsheet, which I love to do. But reach out to them, start to understand how they approach their own partnerships. If they've done it before, what kind of content do they prefer to produce and create? They like to do bundled posts. How much do they charge? If you wanna co-host a webinar, how much of an additional fee would that be? It's okay to start gathering information and take that back to your leadership team. Then you get to build your brief, which is my favorite part. So, First, understand success, then talk to creators, dial in your budgets, and then as you start to create those contracts and nail down who you're gonna work with, build the briefs to act as the strategic guardrails. So how do you want them to show up online? What do you not want them to say? What do you want them to know about your brand that maybe they don't know? What will they not get out of a product demo with you or an explainer video that they wanna make sure they're able to highlight in their video content? So the goal with the campaign brief is not to lock them in so they feel like they're just creating an ad, for your brand, but it is to give them enough of a boundary so they know where they have leeway. And so they can actually comfortably and authentically integrate their voice into their content instead of having to go back and forth with revisions. Tier 2, then you get to activate. So repeat after me, our mantra is experiences.

Experiences.

Not just posts.

Not just posts.

Now that's not to say you can't just do sponsored posts. I— this might be a spicy take, but I think sponsored posts do just fine. It is not a lost art. It's not dead. But if there's nothing curated about it, if you're not intentional about when you're launching campaigns, what you're having them post about, what kind of experience you're creating for the consumer, then it's a bit of a lost art. So integrate creators into your curated customer journeys. And I think one thing to note here too is influencers are not your salespeople.

Mm-hmm.

And I say that because it's really easy to say, I'd like to hire you to do 5 posts for me at this rate, publish them, things are gonna go great. Then you come back, I come back to you and ask you how many sales you've generated. But you have no insight into the funnel that then people are going into, what messaging is in the email or the lead nurture photos that they get afterwards. Like you don't get to decide that. And so I can't put that on you to a certain extent. But what does matter is making sure that any sort of influencer content that you do create, any sort of influencer flows or campaigns that you do curate, it leads back to a purpose and it leads them into a curated journey based on the experience that you've already started. And if your budget allows, go beyond LinkedIn, webinars, YouTube, TikTok. We'll dive into this later, but your buyers do not just live on one platform. And then finally, the third tier, what I would consider to be the most important part. I mentioned this earlier, but Your campaigns should never just be static. You should be refining along the way, iterating what's working, what's not. If you have a 3-month contract with a creator and the first month is going horribly, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't work with them again. It doesn't mean you should cancel the contract. It does mean you should ask yourself what the data is telling you. If they're driving, back to my example, 500,000 impressions and no leads, is it the messaging? Is it the creative? Like taking the time to understand what that story is and then iterating along the way will drive a lot more success. Okay, so choosing the right creators. You know how to approach it, you gotta build your campaign brief, you have to iterate along the way, but who should you partner with? And I think one of the most, the things I hear the most is just work with micro creators or just work with macro. Either work with somebody with 10,000 followers or work with somebody with 200,000 followers. Really the question boils down to what your goals are for your campaign, which drives back to what we talked about originally. But there are 4 main tiers that I bucket creators into. We have the practitioner experts, right? So high authority, but also niche reach. They have deep subject matter expertise and they're trusted voices within very specific segments. Like a Dave Gerhardt, actually. Yeah. Then we have the cultural amplifiers. So maybe they have high trust and/or authority, but their reach is more broad. It's not just one market segment or one ICP. There's value in that too, but it really is gonna go back to your campaign goals. Community connectors, this is where we're talking about moderate authority but very niche reach. That person with 15,000 followers, but 10,000 of them are decision makers at Series B startups. Or attention and drivers. So very broad reach, not really curated or niche content. And so that's gonna be best for things like top-of-funnel awareness, brand impressions, things like that. All right, so you got your creators, you have your campaign brief, now what? This is something I always dealt with when I was in-house, how to actually make this win for your team. And the first thing is starting back when you're defining success. Like I keep saying, and I'll probably be beating a dead horse, if you are aligning with your team at the very beginning before you have any content published, you're gonna be in a much better position than you are 6 months down the line when your campaign is running smoothly but you have no actual results to show for it because you didn't align on success at the beginning. So typically what you'll see is 4 different segments for what they're looking for. Executives and C-suite, we're looking at pipeline generation or influence pipeline, high-intent leads, or category association, right? For sales, obviously influence pipeline or pipeline gen. Product, you're looking more at trials or freemium signups. And CS, maybe like account retention and expansion. And just to note, you do not have to hit all these at once. Most campaigns won't and probably shouldn't. You're gonna pick one primary and one secondary metric. But it is important to look at the other metrics that you're still influencing anyway, so you can tell that full story when you're reporting. Okay, so step 1, you know how you're gonna define success, you know what you're gonna tell your team, you know how to communicate the wins to them. When you're launching an influencer program, the goal is not to be everywhere. It's to learn quickly and to design smarter plays over time. And the brands that win are anchoring their strategy in business outcomes, not just in more followers or partnering with creators with more followers. So first things first, take a step back. Ditch LinkedIn, ditch YouTube, and ask yourself what impact you're actually trying to drive. If you're choosing creators that are based on your ICP and your goals, you might actually realize LinkedIn isn't our first channel, or maybe we dedicate less spend to YouTube and more to TikTok. It's interesting to consider, but it is important to remember that follower counts really don't matter. They kind of do unless you're looking to focus on brand awareness and impressions. And what I always say too is you don't have to spend $500,000 to run a test. You don't have to work with every creator, but you do have to be intentional about the ones that you are partnering with. Pick 3 to 5, run a very intentional experiment, and then design 1 or 2 focus plays around that. So maybe it's a mix of sponsored posts with some webinars or co-branded content. And at the same time, if you're running all these tests but you don't know what success looks like or you don't know how you're gonna measure success, you're gonna be stuck in the same loop. So, Engineer what I call your learning loop. You're gonna use those activations to test narrative, formats, and creator types before you expand your budget, your campaigns, or even your channels. And then measure what matters. So like I said, one primary metric, one secondary. Typically what I see in B2B is lead gen or direct conversions, and then maybe brand awareness, impressions, reach, things like that. But have the two main ones that you're tracking. Continue measuring the rest, continue reporting out on those, but frame the story that you're telling your team and your company around the two main metrics that are gonna define success. All right, so then with step 2, you're turning those signals into strategy. So it's been 3 months, 6 months, campaigns are going well, experiments are running smoothly, you're working with good creators, maybe you're getting more budget, maybe you just wanna stop working with 3 and continue working with the other 4. This is when you can start moving from one-off campaigns or just sponsored posts into longer, longer-term activations. This is when I recommend moving from— 3 months. Let's say a bundle of 3 sponsored posts to an ongoing partnership for 9 months. And when you can start layering your influence, moving from just sponsored posts or just a webinar series to testing other channels, testing in-person events, testing micro events, that's when you can really start expanding on the influence that you're starting to leverage. And also continue to make sure your budget works harder. I think the thing that I see so often is, you know, you get more budget, you get more spend, it's exciting, you're spending money everywhere, but you're not measuring the way that you should. It's easier to scale, harder to continue measuring. So make sure you're building scalable measurements you can report out to your team. And it should always, always, always map back to your business priority. Demand gen, audience growth, whatever the case may be, remember your North Star. I do think it's important to note too, you know, in influence marketing, it's so easy to default to the same 10 well-known voices. I don't know if it's just my LinkedIn feed, but I see people calling this out all the time. You know, you see the top 10 influencers that I follow, that list, and it's the same people over and over again. But buyers want to see themselves in your strategy. They wanna see themselves in your ads. They wanna see themselves in your influencer content. And when you don't do that, you lose relevance. When you do do that well, you gain trust. And so the companies that reflect the audiences that they're targeting consistently outperform. Deloitte and Kantar actually did a research study on this, and they found that representative campaigns typically see 16% higher sales across the board. So it's more than just a DEI initiative. It is actually tied back to business outcomes.

Hey, it's me, Dave.

Our friends over at CustomerIO are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first-party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft because marketing is a craft. It takes creativity, thought, and taste. Right now everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI, and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bleh. AI isn't magic. It's not gonna fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically, but the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what CustomerIO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration, and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters, the craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now, not to replace thinking, but to support it. If this landed with you at all, this idea about the craft of marketing, I want you to go and check out Customer.io. It's customer.io/exit5. Go and check them out. Customer.io/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. Look, I want to tell you about DRIVE 2026. This is our annual event we do for the ExitFive community. It's a 2-day B2B marketing conference in Stowe, Vermont. We built it for marketers who want to get smarter and actually connect with their peers. This isn't a generic industry conference. It's a small, intentionally designed event where the programming, the venue, and the schedule all work together to create the conditions for real conversations. Attendees spend 2 days getting into the tactical details of B2B marketing, what's working, what's not, and how the best teams are thinking about the problems that actually matter. This is all about workshops, sessions, and discussions that are built around participation, not passive listening. I want you to actually come and be there. If you're gonna take the time to leave your family, leave the office, get outside of work, like actually be here, take notes, pay attention. It makes it all worth it. And Here's the thing though, the B2B marketing stuff, that's what's gonna get you to justify the ROI on your ticket. That's why you're gonna be able to tell your boss that you want to go to this, but the best moments at DRIVE don't happen on stage. They happen at breakfast, on an afternoon hike, over a drink, after dinner, right? Somebody's gonna be roasting marshmallows at this place. It's that type of event. We designed this for, um, for this connection. This is on purpose. Long breaks, unhurried meals, and opt-in activities where people spend time together outside the session room because look, We're all people. Where else in your life can you talk to someone else who understands your job as a B2B marketer? I go to my kids' swim lessons. I can't sit there and talk to the dad next to me about B2B marketing, but you can through the Exit5 community. And that's what DRIVE is all about. It's September 8th through 10th, 2026 at the lodge at Spruce Peak in Stowe, Vermont. Check it out, exit5.com/drive to learn more about it. It's exit5.com/drive. And I hope to see you there.

And it's one thing, you know, to kind of just plug some diverse creators into your ads or your campaigns. It's another to take the time to understand who your audience is, what actually matters to them, how they represent themselves or how they want to be represented. Do that research and then plug them into your campaigns that way as well. So if your influencer program features the same 5 voices as everyone else, it's important to ask yourself, are you really building influence or are you just broadcasting to the same echo chamber? So a couple of case studies so that we can nail this down. One is SEMrush. Did anybody go to Spotlight last year? I think it was in Amsterdam. So they actually started with an invite-only influencer program in London, tested it out with 10 to 12 marketing creators, and they structured it like a B2C pop-up. So they had a photographer out there to do headshots. They had them do like a street team activation where they stop people on the street and ask them questions about their marketing programs. That did well, and so their next step was to turn it into a whole in-real-life conference in Amsterdam in 2024 called Spotlight. That led to 500+ organic social posts, 3 million impressions, and 1,000 attendees, and they're running it back this year as well. Second example, Sprout Social. So they co-host micro-events and dinners across the country with top creators, and what you'll typically see, if you haven't seen this online, is they tie it to a conference or an event that's already happening in that city. They did it with Inbound, they did it with Spotlight, I believe, So they sponsor these community-led events instead of creating the event themselves and then inviting a bunch of random customers to it. What they do is they tailor it to the audience that the creator they're co-hosting with speaks to, and they host 10, 20, maybe 30 people. Then they use that creator content across different channels, and they will also send creators as brand reps to industry events. And so this is what I mean by micro-events or experiences that you can curate. I will say I wouldn't start with this if you're trying to prove out influencer marketing in your brand or in your company. It is important to validate it with something that you can measure, quantifiable and tangible success, 'cause that's how you're gonna get the budget that you need for events like this. When you're ready to start investing in longer-term relationships and building more experiential moments, micro-events with creators are a great idea. And Novatick, is Natalie Marco Tullio here? Yeah. Okay, I feel like an infomercial for them. I talk about them all the time, but basically they built a hybrid influencer and advisory program with product product and audience fluency. So essentially any creator they work with gets regular demos, they get access to content before it goes live, and they don't rely so much on follower counts. They actually focus more on subject matter expertise. And then they also, the creators also create content for them, but they're a lot more focused on finding ways to integrate the creators or the advisors into their program and into their existing tech stack and marketing strategy rather than just partnering with influencers across LinkedIn who have a ton of followers. Mm-hmm. So to bring it all home, you have your 90-day pilot. What I always recommend to anybody that wants to do influencer marketing, if you can only do it for a month or for 60 days, it's just not long enough. The absolute minimum is 90 days. I would always aim higher, but 90 days is great to start. So the first 30, you're gonna set up to learn. Understand who you're trying to target, what their pain points are for the specific campaign, how you wanna engage with them, and who you wanna partner with. Nail down your budget. You can start with asking creators first to get a better idea, then onboard the creators. This is when you take time to do product demos, walkthroughs if they're not already using the product, and then you can do content brainstorms as well. I do this with creators all the time. You do a 60-minute walkthrough with them, brainstorm with them for another 60, and then give them basically a library of content that they can then build on for themselves. Lock in at least 3 deliverables per creator. If you're doing a 90-day pilot, it should be no less than 1 sponsored post per month. Maybe 2 to 3 if you have the budget, and make sure you're building out your tracking and measurement before you start. Next 30 days, you have your creators locked in, contracts are signed, briefs are sent out, you start to activate your campaigns and monitor the performance. So this is when you start to test your messaging, your initial messaging, and then collect feedback not just from your audience, but from the creators themselves. How's the audience reacting? How are they liking the content that they're producing? They feel like it's resonating with their audience. Are they seeing the results that they would want to see from their content? This is when you can start to refine fast, but you also have to move quickly and be willing to pivot as well. And then track the movement across the funnel. Let's say you're looking for just generated pipeline and impressions, right? But see how many people are getting stuck at different stages in the funnel as well. And also a great thing to see is how it's influencing customer retention, if it is at all. And then by day 90, this is when you can take all the performance data, analyze and adjust. So that creator feedback, any early signals you saw, double down on who's performing well, maybe kick out who isn't, and then use those learnings to evolve into longer-term partnerships. And once you're past those 90 days, that's when you can scale beyond the pilot. So double down on what's working. This is when you can start speaking to the leadership team to a deeper extent as well about what's working and what's not, what you're gonna do differently, who you're gonna partner with, what ICP this is resonating with and which one it isn't. You can start layering new activation types and then build for repeatability. And then this is where you can move from what I consider like scattered campaigns to a clearer system. It's okay if this isn't all fleshed out on day 1. It's okay if it isn't all fleshed out on day 90. And I think what's interesting too is day 180, 2 years in, you're still gonna be pivoting, you're still gonna be refining, but you are gonna have a much clearer grasp of what's working and what's not. So you can make sure you're partnering with the right creators and wasting less time. Of your time. And that's all I have.

Love it. I have a bunch of questions for you actually.

Oh, smart.

So one of the things that's challenging and like this started out like I did a bunch of this early before ExitFive became a real company. And so I have an interesting like point of view as like being an influencer, right? And I think one of the things that it's hard to, I think it's because it's a new channel. I think a lot of marketing leaders and teams kind of just like, they expect to throw money on it and a result to magically happen.

Yeah.

And it's like, we don't treat it like it, like if you ran a bunch of Google Ads and the Google Ads were shitty because they drove to shitty landing pages and shitty offers, are you gonna go to Google and say, well, Google doesn't work?

Yeah.

And I think a lot of, I think a big part of this, and you hit on this, is like understanding what the offer is and having a real strategy versus like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna pay Brianna to do a post and we're gonna get this one an off thing. How do you think about like working with companies or do you have any examples of like of offers that have been effective? Because unlike consumer brands, the offer is not always just direct sales and like in B2B it could be 8 to 12 months before I, you know, I, I seen Brianna post 3 times over the course of the year and then I also went to one of their webinars and I also did this other thing and then I ended up buying. Do you have any advice around like how marketers can coach their teams and leadership on like how to, how to think about the, the offer and the result of these.

Yeah, well, I think it's funny you bring up Google Ads too, 'cause I, I feel like leadership teams do that. Like ads won't work and then they say, Google doesn't work for us, let's turn it off and try another platform. So I think it's actually a very similar pain point. You expect to just throw this messaging and it'll work with creators too, and it just won't, right? You're dealing with human psychology with the way people digest information and consume it. When I think about the offer, it really needs to tie back to what your customer actually cares about, or what your target audience actually cares about. You know, I forget which company it is. There was some agency, I think Tim Davidson worked there, where you did like these gift cards that apparently everybody just loved. It was like these $25 gift cards, and they were closing like crazy. For some reason that works, right? And so it might be a pattern interrupt, it might not be the offer that you think. It's okay if it's a longer sales cycle, but what I would ask myself or ask my team is, Okay, what are the short-term wins that we can account for here, especially if it's a longer sales cycle? What are the long-term wins? And then how can we incentivize people not just once, read this post, click this button and get 25% off, but how can we continue to engage them throughout the course of that influencer campaign or of that activation? But I think it just starts with understanding where your customers are at.

And the other thing is, what's your take on like how to actually go and find creators? I'll tell you what I say to people and you can maybe poke holes in it, but This question drives me nuts because I feel like as a marketer, there's not going to be some magic database that has a list of people in your industry. Doesn't this just come back to like having a strong opinion about your industry, actively watching, listening to podcasts, watching videos on YouTube, seeing who's, who has a voice on TikTok? Like, I do think we kind of expect there to be some magic database of like, oh, we sell into finance and like, here's the ranked followers versus finance versus Don't you need to actually know, like, do you feel like it has to be firsthand knowledge of where the creators are? Or maybe am I, am I wrong? Is there some way to figure out who's influential in your space?

There are two ways. So there are actually some platforms. If you're looking for LinkedIn-specific creators, Limelight is a great one. I don't believe you can filter by industry, but you can see like which audiences they speak to, what the demographics are, and then actually reach out to them through Limelight as well, I believe. Outside of that, there is Grin, there's Aspire where you can categorize by content type, content pillars, like the typical audience they speak to. I don't use any of those. I prefer more manual approaches. So what I actually like to do is speak to customers, existing customers, and ask them who they follow and who they trust. I did this a lot in fintech as well when you're speaking to accountants, like what newsletters do you follow? Which podcasts you listen to? Are there creators that you look to to give you up-to-date accounting information or accounting news. It's a little manual, but you should be speaking to your customers anyway, so it's kind of a win-win. But you can speak to your customers, understand who they care about, who they trust already. And then another great way, also a bit manual, but just Google literally like top fintech influencers, top X creators. You'll start to see these curated lists across Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and you can use those as like your first step into finding creators and then look at who they're following and engaging with, then you'll build a flywheel of—

It's like a lookalike audience of creators.

Exactly.

Questions for Brianna on influencer marketing.

Yeah. So for that, that top left quadrant where maybe you want an influencer who can go super deep in subject matter expertise in like a niche, a very niche industry. You've mentioned like you can choose to like drop 3, work with 4, and like a lot of Plurals. Is it feasible to do this with like one influencer versus a pool of influencers if you're in a niche industry?

Yes.

Short answer is yes, you can. One, your data is going to be minimal because you can test less content types, less messaging, things like that. And you're also just beholden to whoever their content happens to perform that day as opposed to, kind of spreading the risk across 4 to 5 influencers or 3 to 4. I will say if you're gonna partner with one creator, you have to look at the short-term wins or metrics a lot less. Still track them and measure them, obviously, but you're gonna be looking at, or what I'd recommend is looking at a way longer-term partnership because you're gonna work with them pretty closely, or you should work with them closely on refining the messaging along the way, pivoting to different types of content, focusing on different kinds of campaigns with them and seeing what lands. Mm-hmm. My recommendation is at least 3, but you can make it work with 1.

Hi, I'm Stephanie. I signed my first influencer. We had our first webinar. It was really successful. So I got budget for 3 more webinars, but now I'm struggling because my, I want to ingest like more product into it, but my product is technical. It requires professional services. And since we're not B2C, we can't just like send a tube of lipstick. So how are you seeing the influencers that you work with use product, like, in their day-to-day, if I can't just turn it on for them overnight. What's the product? What's a creative solution? It's a SaaS platform, so we help automate the mundane parts of sellers' days.

Mundane parts of what?

Of a seller's day, like account planning, deal qualification, forecasting.

How did you— sorry, I have questions for you.

Yeah, yeah.

How did you structure your first webinar?

I mean, it was a one-time contract, signed a webinar, said if I was successful, if I hit the registration goals and the MQL goals, I would sign 3 more. So we did hit those goals and we signed 3 more together, but it was more thought leadership than product specific.

Were there product like integrations or mentions within the webinar or was it?

Yes. The, the person on our side, that's what we did. We would show up and we would ask them a question and we'd be like, oh, and by the way, this is how we do it.

Okay.

So there's product mentions, but like if I want them to get behind the camera in my product, are you seeing people do that with influencers?

I am. I wouldn't say it performs very well.

Okay, good to know.

Yeah, I think the thing with co-hosting webinar with a creator is kind of going back to what I alluded to with influencers aren't salespeople. You're leveraging them, I would assume, because of their thought leadership and the credibility and trust that they've built with their audience. So what I'd recommend is what, like looking at the funnel that you have them going into after the webinar, still continue with the product integration, still mention the product, maybe even have a segment during the webinar where you just talk about the product for a little bit. Another recommendation I have is if you have a Q&A element, if you don't, add one, but if you have a Q&A element, manufacture some questions in there that you can then speak to the product specifically. But I wouldn't put the onus on the webinar and the influencer alone just to handle that.

Oh yeah, just to build on that, I think in B2B it's different. Like nobody, I think the play would be like, use that relationship to get interest of a new audience. And then it's on you after to nurture and follow up and to share product-related stuff. And it's like, hey, we earned your— like, use the webinar to get people to know, like, and trust you. And for some reason, and then now you have the right to like reach out to these people and have something thoughtful to say.

Yeah.

I think especially in B2B, a lot of times the influencer and creator types of partnerships, it is, it is different than like, here's me trying on this lipstick. It's more like, Can we, do we have a shared mission around like the story that our company sells? And so like your mission, your ICP is salespeople finding influencers who make interesting content to salespeople. Like the dream one would be like you do a collaboration with Corporate Natalie, right? And, and, or Corporate Bro. And it doesn't, you don't need them pitching your product. You're using their, their audience. That's the whole point of the influencer thing. You're drafting off an audience that's, that's not yours, right?

Yeah. Or even building off that, like partnering with somebody who specifically has built trust with a sales audience, like a Kevin Dorsey. Yeah. Or John Barrows, 'cause then they're gonna bring more of that audience and you have to do less work to bring them in.

What else? You in the back, shout it out, sir.

I'm glad you mentioned the sales, that ties into my question. So can you talk about how you discuss risk, especially to the brand with your clients about—

Yeah.

I'm gonna hand the mic over to—

influencers. The reason I mentioned this is there was a pretty universally sales influencer-led campaign that went out at least a couple months ago and it was just hilariously a bunch of group chats that I'm in. A lot of fun was made of it. Okay. It was like a superhero AI whatever mumbo jumbo, but it was just getting torn to shreds in private conversations and DMs and people saying, have you seen this? What a joke. Like, I haven't seen it. I don't know the joke. When I started to look at it, I was like, my goodness, this company, I'm not hearing, it's the first time I've heard of them. I'm not hearing anything positive about their brand. And it's been like this one influencer campaign may have just trashed it entirely, killed the startup, I don't know. So there's inherent risk involved with bringing outsiders in. Can you talk about how you cover that off with your clients?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think first off, my assumption with that story would be that they did not, okay, hopefully that marketer isn't in this room, but whoever that marketer is, My assumption is they didn't speak to like maybe their sales team or to CS or to some other department about the influencer program or campaign before it launched. Like when I hear about an influencer campaign flopping so tragically like that, it's typically 'cause it's built in a silo. And to an extent, they're probably not even asking the influencer themselves for their opinion. They're handing them a brief and maybe it looks fun or it looks engaging, but they're not taking the time to truly understand if it's what their ICP is looking for. And so that's where I start with that conversation with risk with brands is, okay, your CEO might have this cool idea or your head of marketing might have this cool idea. Let's actually pre-validate it a bit. Look at who your customer base actually trusts. Look at what kind of content actually resonates with them to the extent that we can figure that out. And that's how we'll mitigate that risk. Especially in B2B, it's very risky to do fun, catchy content. And I think it can also flop really easily. Because humor just isn't really a big part of B2B marketing. So you have to be very careful and weigh the risks. And that's what typically what I say to the C-suite. I also do say if you want to run a campaign like that, if you wanna kind of test the waters, start with something that your audience will actually be expecting first and then maybe get creative once you have like initial messaging and validation built out. That's where I would start.

Yeah.

Does that mean influencers are bad or like couldn't have been the company that put out that shitty campaign and they still would've gotten roasted, right?

I don't know.

That's like, I don't wanna—

Yeah. Jeez, am I gonna, if I try to do this for winter, am I gonna blow it?

Am I gonna have people—

Yeah, maybe, but that's what Harry talked about. That's the risk. And I think you do know, and sometimes you have to try something crazy. I think a lot of times though, if it's gonna be that bad, there's usually a red light. There's a yellow flag behind the scenes at like somewhere.

Well, that's another thing too. Like when I think about, let's say the Notion Faces campaign, people were tearing that apart on LinkedIn. I consider it extremely successful. The Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad, I hate to say it, but like their stock increased, the jeans are selling well, I guess like that. So was it successful? Okay, people are making fun of it, so maybe not. Did it impact their bottom line? We don't actually know. I think that's the part that we can't speak to if we're not working on the team or seeing those results. But it is worth asking like, okay, is this just driving conversation and what kind of conversation is it sparking? I would say that one would be unsuccessful because if they're making fun of it to that extent. I don't know what it was. I know how I heard about it.

Universally, there was no positive sentiment towards me.

But that, yeah, that's what I would ask.

Let's go to Harry and then we'll go over to Dave Gerhardt.

Just a quick one.

I see when this stuff happens, sometimes it says this is an ad and they tend to not work as well. Is there a way of getting around that or do you have any advice for —for dealing with that? Are you talking about like the specific ad disclosure?

Yeah, ad disclosure.

So first thing I'll say, Federal Trade Commission does require the influencers to disclose a brand partnership, whether it's paid, product is given in return, whatever the case may be. If there's some form of compensation, they have to disclose it. So the ways around it, I think one thing creators could do better and brands can encourage them with this is you don't just have to put like hashtag ad at the bottom. I think that's really off-putting. You can say, really grateful to have partnered with XYZ, with Notion, right? Really grateful to have partnered with whatever brand. I think finding ways to integrate it into your content as a creator is a lot more effective, but that also ties back to the kind of campaign you're building as the brand. So giving them the opportunity to create their own content and have creative freedom will allow for more like seamless integration like that. And spicy take, like if it still flops, the content probably wasn't great. So use that to refine your messaging for the next time. Test activation that you do with that creator, see what landed and what didn't. Chances are it's not just because they said it was an ad. I think a lot of it, a lot of time it ties back to like audience alignment or just they're caught off guard. Like the product doesn't align with their audience. They've never heard them talk about it. They've never talked about like their tech stack before, for example. Creators also need to find a way to make sure the content aligns with their audience, but brands need to make sure they're partnering with creators who can make that seamless integration. Does that answer your question? Yeah.

Cool. I was just going to make a comment on that, that campaign. And if you're in here, I apologize. I'm sure many of you in this room were probably invited to take part in that. And I know that I was. And if they were to just follow your framework, I think that would not have been quite the disaster that it was perceived to be on social media.

Yeah.

Because just me as the person that didn't participate but got the kit, it was given to me and I'm not sure others 24 hours before the launch date. I didn't know what it was or what it was for. It was just a question from CEO saying, hey, do you wanna participate in this? And I said, sounds cool, send me more.

Yeah.

Day before campaign, here's your stuff. You look at it and you go, eh, it's a little weird. And then this happens.

Yeah, I think that's, and not to bash on this brand too, I think any brand that's trying influencer marketing is, especially in the B2B space, that's worth celebrating and worth encouraging. I think that speaks to the reactivity element of it too. Like if they've given, if you give your creators more time, to digest the campaign and give their feedback, you're also gonna be able to refine it even before you launch it. That's also why you should have contracting in place. So just a note there.

Cool. All right, you can find Brianna after if you want. Give it up for Brianna.

Thank you.

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