Creator-Led Growth: How to Choose The Right Type Of Creator

My name is Ashley and I have a guilty pleasure. Fear not, it's safe for work. You all have guilty pleasures. We're going to be good friends here, right? So this is my guilty pleasure. This is a show on Netflix. It's called America's Sweethearts and it is a docu series about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Now, I'm originally from Texas, so like, I had to like this show, but I also genuinely like this show. So watching my guilty pleasure show, watching America's Sweethearts. And Kelly, who is the director of the DCCs, she is in charge of the audition process. And so she starts to actually introduce all of the judges to the auditionees. And she gets to this fellow Kevin. And this is the word she actually says. She says, and we even have Kevin. And his specialty is. Now, I don't know if you can see this on the screen, but something caught my eye. What is that? Wellness and lifestyle thought leader. So naturally I have my guilty pleasure show and my guilty pleasure topic and I like sit up in bed, it's nine o' clock at night on a Monday, and I'm like, why is she talking about thought leadership on America's Sweethearts? So Kelly continues and she's reading the bio and she says, Kevin is a nationally recognized wellness and lifestyle thought leader. And she's got this confused look. She stumbles over the word. And then she says this. I don't know what a thought leader is. And so she looks at Kevin as she says this, expecting, expecting him to explain to her what a thought leader is. This is his actual response. You can ask my publicist who wrote that. Right. So what is thought leadership? Nobody knows, including Kevin. Well, I do. I know. And I have to tell you, this presentation has been in the works since 1996. Yes, that is an eight year old Ashley in a DCC uniform for glamour shots. If you grew up in the south, you know about glamour shots. It was in the mall. Thank you. The big hair. We got this going. So fast forward a couple of decades, I start nerding out about thought leadership, subject matter expertise and influencer marketing. And so over the last decade, I have been wrestling with this problem. What is thought leadership? Why does it matter? And is there a difference between a subject matter expert, influencer and thought leader? So today I want to walk you through a couple of pillars and how to work with each of these types of creators in the marketing mix. And I do want to ask a spicy question, which is which one should you nix from the marketing mix? So I will frame up the framework by saying that this is about knowledge workers. It's not just about being famous, musicians, celebrities, etc. This very specifically applies to business people. So all of the pillars work together in tandem. And the first one is credibility. This is about whether people actually believe you when you speak. Do you have that depth of expertise? Do people trust you when you say things? Next is profile. And this is what a lot of people think of when they think of a thought leader or an influencer. It's somebody who is famous. They have a big following, they can step on big stages. People know who they are. Third, being prolific. This is about how much you publish. Are you writing, are you speaking, are you doing long form, are you doing short form, are you doing written, are you doing visual content? And finally, depth of ideas. This is the thoughts in thought leadership. So you have to be doing something new, innovative or disruptive to actually be strong in the depth of ideas pillar. Now, realistically, it is very hard to get to the top of these pillars. I would say this is a realistic thought leader pillar. Right? You're very strong in credibility. You have that high expertise. You maybe have industry or field level profile. You're well known, well recognized in your field, you are very prolific. This is the only One that is 100% in your control. How much you publish is all on you. And then finally, depth of ideas. So most people are not at this visionary level. Right? They're not driving us into the future in a place we've never been before. So if you get to the top, obviously you are a thought leader, but it's a little hard to get to the top. And thought leaders aren't the only B2B creators. So let's talk about some of the differences between the subject matter expert, the influencer and, and the thought leader and how we work them in the marketing mix. So first, subject matter experts. So these people tend to help explain how to solve and troubleshoot existing problems using existing solutions. These people can help drive medium and long term usage goals. And this is how they score on the pillars. So these people have high expertise. They, they've probably been practitioners for 20 years. These are the folks in your organization that if you have a question, you know who to go to. They are the person. And so because they have that high credibility and expertise, they're actually very strong in depth of ideas. They're so close to the existing problems and solutions that they're actually pretty good at coming up with new problems and new ways to solve those problems. But they tend to be very internally focused. They're not sharing externally, they're not prolific and so they have not built a profile. Next, influencers. Influencers help you reach a new audience and these people can help you drive short term awareness goals or long term sales goals. And here's what influencers look like. So they have to have at least some credibility, otherwise they're not actually influencing anyone. Right. But they tend to have a very high profile. They've got a lot of social media followers, they have a ton of YouTube subscribers or newsletter subscribers. They're very well known and they are famous in their industries. They might be prolific, but they're usually focused on one channel. You've heard of Instagram influencers or LinkedIn influencers, or someone who's big on YouTube. And finally, from a depth of ideas perspective, they tend to be quite low. Again, they have to be experienced in the space at least a little bit and they're usually highlighting existing tactics. And finally, thought leaders. So these people focus on new ideas in the market and they drive the conversation about what's next and they help the audience think in a new way. And thought leaders have a ton of benefits so they can educate the market and build trust. They can drive long term impact goals for sales, partnerships, job candidates, recruiting and of course revenue. And this is what they look like. So you can still be moving in that thought leadership direction if you are only innovating at the tactical level. But what we really want to see is folks moving up in their credibility, being more prolific and then obviously starting to grow that profile and those depth of ideas. So as I said, spicy question today. Which one do we nix from the marketing mix? I just told you, there's benefits to all of them. So spoiler alert. It depends. Per usual, this is why we can't have nice things in marketing. So what kind of questions do you want to ask first? What are your goals, what outcomes do you want to drive and which metrics will you measure? As we saw in the previous slides, each of these types of creators helps you drive different outcomes across different time horizons. So you need to match your creator to the goals and the time horizons where they are creating. Next, who's the audience? Are they internal? Are they external? What are their pain points? These are standard marketing questions. But the number of times I see folks trying to say, oh, we want to ask this person with 0following to help us reach a new audience, those are mismatched goals. And finally, what gaps in content do you have? And then what capabilities do you have in house? You may have a ton of production budget, but zero talent. You may have a ton of in house talent, but zero budget. So what gaps do you have and how are you going to fill them? So this is a quick snapshot to compare the B2B creators. As you can see, SMEs tend to address an internal audience and as their primary focus, they tend to focus on existing problems and solutions and then they tend to drive usage metrics over a medium to long term time horizon. Influencers tend to focus on an external audience, they're focused on existing solutions and they help drive awareness and sales goals over the short term and the long term. And finally, our thought leaders. So these people focus on both internal and external audiences. They talk about new problems and new solutions and then they help drive trust and affinity in the long term. So let's talk about how we pair with our SMEs. First, some pitfalls. Forcing them into a box. So I see this in two extremes. Either a company is trying to force them to be an influencer or they're pigeonholing them and saying you're not allowed to speak, you're not allowed to share. The reality is these people have deep expertise, expertise and they may want to actually build their profile. Or just stay focused on internal work. So don't force them into a box. Next, do not ask them to regurgitate marketing content. I'm a marketer. I pair with SMEs. I work in developer marketing. I love pairing with technical SMEs. The last thing I want to do is lose all of the credibility that they bring to the table by by asking them to just slap their name on whatever I've put together to sell my product. And then finally, a one and done approach. So you work with these SMEs to create this awesome pillar content and then what happens? It sits on the shelf. It sits behind a gated landing page. It sits in one nurture campaign. So once you've gotten all of that great content from the SME, make sure you're repurposing, repackaging and redistributing that content frequently. So here's some ways that SMEs can help in the marketing mix. First, they're excellent reviewers and editorial contributors. So I love doing this. I love giving an editorial contribution call out on blogs if somebody else has written the majority of it or reviewed by and this name. This is particularly helpful with the New Perspectives tab on Google where they're looking for that trustworthiness and that authoritativeness. They want to see that There's a human editorial review and contribution is a great way to showcase the subject matter expert who helped put together this article. Next. They're actually great for customer engagements. So these folks often sit in a solution engineering team, a customer success team. They actually love meeting with customers one on one or helping them implement. They're also great at sales trainings and demos. They know the problem space, they know the pain points, and they know the products inside and out. So get them to help you train your sales team, get them to help record demos about different use cases. And finally, for the folks that do want to share more externally, they're excellent for company hosted user conferences. So they love to work the booth, they love to get up close and personal with the customers. They might actually enjoy speaking and showcasing the products. So I want to introduce you to my colleague Andrew here. He is a subject matter expert at Atlassian who I work with very closely. And when Andrew first came to Atlassian, this was his profile. He's got over 20 years of experience managing IT ops, engineering and product teams. So he has very high credibility. And because of that credibility, he's actually doing some really interesting work with new solutions. But when he came to Atlassian, he had zero profile and he was not prolific. And that was partly because he worked in a regulated industry, so he was not allowed to share. And everything that he did put out was tightly controlled. So I did check with Andrew about showing this and he was very embarrassed. This is what he used to post on LinkedIn. You'll see there's like two years between these screenshots and it's literally like, hello, we have a job. We are now hiring for a job. Thank you. And he's like, oh man, this is so bad. Right? He had less than 1,000 followers when he first joined Atlassian as an evangelist. He was nowhere. And so he started like most SMEs do. He started publishing about our product on our internal Confluence instance to help educate his peers. He started recording regular loom videos to start sharing insights from customers. Then he started to transition a little bit. He wanted to grow his profile, so he started publishing content on our owned properties, like our microsites. He started creating demos about the product and publishing it on the company YouTube. And then he took that content and started sharing it on his personal LinkedIn profile. And of course he spoke at our developer conference, Unleash. And he staffed the Atlassian booth at a variety of industry conferences. But then something changed. He really wanted to grow and so he started publishing his original content like this concept of the complexity limit on our owned properties as well. So fast forward to today. Andrew speaks. He does analyst briefings, he does press briefings, he's on podcasts, and he's actually grown to almost 4,000 followers. So now he runs a team of evangelists. This is a snapshot of their JIRA board. So we work together with them from a marketing perspective to see what content they're creating, how we might be able to use it in the marketing mix. Some of these folks do the traditional subject matter expert route where they're mostly focused on internal audiences or one to one customers. And then other people like Andrew are continuing to grow their profile. So this is Andrew today. He's grown in his credibility. Obviously his profile and being prolific is continuing to grow and he's now talking about original and Atlassian focused content. Next, working with influencers. So, common pitfalls, focusing only on a big following. Just because somebody has a lot of people in their audience doesn't mean they have the right people in the audience. So you need to be thinking holistically about who they're reaching. And if those people are in your target customer profile. Next, asking these people to post company related content or forcing them to get approval for every single piece of content. That makes no sense. If you want to hire someone to read a script for you, you can do that. It's called advertising. That is completely different than having an influencer partnership. That obviously brings us to the next one, which is a short term transactional approach. In order for influencers to truly work as part of your marketing mix, they have to have credibility with their audience, which means that they have to build that trust over time. So if they're just shilling for a brand over and over again, they're going to end up with the same amount of credibility that you have, which is much lower because they're trying to sell. And then finally, I see this one a lot. Ignoring your internal influencers, those subject matter experts that actually want to grow externally, they are great people to be influencers for the brand. So I want to give a quick snapshot of internal versus external influencers. I want to be clear as a baseline, both types have built a strong personal brand, but they do have a different focus when it comes to their expertise, their employment, etc. So from an expertise standpoint, your internal influencers are primarily aligned to products. External influencers are primarily aligned to the target audience employment. Your internal influencers are employees. They are on staff at the company versus external influencers or non employees. They might be Customers or users. Or they could just be external industry folks that you want to reach. From a brand relationship standpoint, internal influencers often become the face of the brand. And you'll see this a lot in the examples that I'm going to show where you've probably met these people and you know, like, oh, yeah, this is Laura from Dream Data. Versus external influencers tend to have a limited association with the company and they might work with a bunch of different brands. And finally, the content mix. So internal influencers are doing a mix of craft and company related content. External influencers are doing industry or craft related content content. So your key criteria for choosing your influencers. First, shared values. You have to start here. These people are going to be ambassadors to an audience on your behalf. You gotta trust each other. And this goes into why you don't want to have to ask them to approve every single piece of content. If your values and your mission are not aligned, you're not going to have that trust to let them speak on your behalf. Next, having a passion for creating and engaging content. Another spicy opinion that I hold. I am no longer trying to convince anyone to share content if they don't want to. Those SMEs, I can work with them even if they don't want to share externally. So if they don't want to speak, they don't want to be on stage, they don't want to write, fine, don't. So find people who have a passion for creating and engaging. And this also translates to your external influencers, particularly around their audience and brand alignment. Find people that are already passionate about your space. Find people who might already be using your products. Trying to go net new to somebody who has nothing to do with your industry, your products or the problems you solve means you're going to struggle to build trust with them and they're going to struggle to have trust with their audience. And then finally, they got to have content distribution skills. And this is particular for internal influencers. And again, we get this sense of like, this person's super smart, we're going to turn him into an influencer. They're bad public speakers, they're slow writers, and they're terrible on video. Sorry, why are we asking them to do that? No, work with the people in the skill sets that they have. And again, this goes for your external influencers as well. Don't ask a LinkedIn influencer to suddenly become an Instagram influencer. Don't ask someone who's excellent at YouTube to try to start a podcast for you. Work with them in the channels where they're already spending time. So this is Laura. Laura is a sales leader at Dream Data. She might be in the audience or you've seen her floating around, but Laura is an internal influencer. And I want to be clear, she would never call herself an influencer. I am designating her as an influencer in part because her profile looks like this. So Laura has high credibility in social selling, attribution and data and general SAS methodology. She is well recognized across her field. Again, many of you probably know her and she's actually moving up in the prolific pillars. So she excels at short form content on LinkedIn, but she started presenting more and she started being on more podcasts. And from a depth of ideas perspective, she's showcasing new tactics across social skills, selling and attribution. So let's talk about Laura. She has over 30,000 followers and you can see that she creates content that can go viral sometimes. It's got thousands of reactions and hundreds of comments and she often creates a lot of content about the behind the scenes work that she does with customers and what's happening at Dream Data. And then she does do product demos and she represents them at events. So Laura is heavily associated with Dream Data and the work that they're doing. She has built a very strong following on her own. But, you know, she works for Dream Data, she's selling Dream Data and she is an excellent advocate for Dream Data. Next, external influencer, I want to talk about Sarah Stella Latanzio. Again, many of you probably know her from LinkedIn. She would also cringe at being called an influencer. However, she is the head of marketing at Striver and she does have several external brand partnerships, including a partnership with Semrush. So this is how I'd rate Sarah. And Sarah is kind of in that middle level. She's got strong credibility in content marketing. She's well known at the field level as a content marketer. She's quite prolific. She's excellent at carousels and short form video, primarily on LinkedIn. And then from a depth of ideas perspective, she is starting to starting to share new strategies for what's happening in the marketing space, particularly with AI. So let's take a look at Sarah. She has over 40,000 followers now. She recently earned the top voice badge on LinkedIn and she shares content regularly about improving your content marketing strategy and tactics. And her content gets a ton of engagement. You can see here frequently hundreds of reactions, hundreds of comments. Now this is some of her content from Semrush and The interesting thing about this is her branded content still gets a ton of engagement, and that's because it's all related to stuff she would already talk about. It's highly aligned to the audience she's built and the audience what they care about in terms of pain points and the content she regularly shares. And I just want to highlight one carousel here. This is a partnership post that she did for Semrush. And you'll see she boldly mentioned Semrush right at the front of the carousel and says, I'm going to talk to you about Semrush. The thing that she does that's different is that she continues to help you whether you buy Semrush or not. She gives you new strategies and tactics and she shows you how you could use Semrush to do this. But whether you buy the tool or not, you still get value from the carousel and that's why you want to have those shared values and you want to have someone who's passionate and credible in the space. And finally, thought leaders. So some common first, misunderstanding, thought leadership. It is not just about quality content, non product content, or contrarian content. True thought leadership content helps the audience think and act in a new way. It moves them into the future. Next, focusing solely on executives. So you've just seen two awesome creators, both internal and external, and then also subject matter experts that you have internally. So having a fancy title does not automatically make you a thought leader. And as we've seen, some of those subject matter experts have really strong credibility and depth of ideas. They just need the brand to give them a halo to build that profile. And then finally, outsourcing content creation. A lot of people want a ghost thinker, not a ghost writer. You don't do content for executives. You gotta have thoughts. So again, look through who has that credibility and depth of expertise before you start declaring people with a big title to be thought leaders. So how do we work with these folks? First of all, the narratives. What I see often is that people have shallow depth of narratives. They don't actually have enough to talk about over the long run. So instead we want to address content at three different depths. First, the conceptual depth. So this is theoretical and philosophical in nature. It's the what and the why of the idea, and it's probably your core three to five ideas. Next, strategic. So this focuses on the tools, processes and key knowledge components that must be in place to make that conceptual idea reality. This helps the audience frame up the solution space and do their own research. And finally, Tactical. So this is a prescriptive, nitty gritty, step by step instructions that have to be done regularly to implement the strategies to make the conceptual idea reality. Next, outlets and influencers. So a lot of people think that thought leadership is just blasting out whatever I have to say. But the reality is to have that credibility and trust, you also have to know the key problems and trends in the industry and who else is talking about them. There's also really great opportunities for you to partner and build that profile by working with people who are one to two steps ahead of you. So anytime I'm working with someone who wants to become a thought leader, I ask them to fill this out. Where do you want to pitch? Where do you want to write? Who do you want to connect with to help build your own profile? And then finally, the personal brand. So the key here, there is not a perfect personal brand. The key is to be consistent. How do you write? How do you speak? How do you dress? Do you curse on stage? That's one of my favorite questions to ask people. Do you curse on stage? Do you curse in writing? So again, there's not a right answer. There is a consistent answer. So I want to talk through one last example. This is Nancy Duarte, and I would say that she is at the top, top of the field across all of these pillars. So if you are in storytelling or communication or presentations, you know Nancy and her work. Now, as I've said, the pillars do work together in tandem. One is not more important than the other. But I want to show a couple of proof points for Nancy. So first, from a credibility standpoint, she's been doing this for 30 years. She is the CEO of Duarte, and she has been working across persuasive communication for decades. From the profile pillar standpoint, Nancy has hundreds of thousands of followers across LinkedIn and Twitter. And then she also takes big stages. She's been on ted, she's been on Lenny's podcast. She frequently draws huge audiences for her talks. Next. She has been prolific again for 30 years. So she's written multiple books, she's written multiple courses that have been turned into in person workshops. She's a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, and she's writing, speaking, appearing on podcasts and sharing on social frequently. And finally, depth of ideas. So Nancy's core original idea was this idea of the secret structure of great talks. And so she invented this what is what could be framework that she delivered in her first TED Talk. And obviously since then, she's delivered multiple models out into the world that she's used as the basis of her books and her workshops. So as it turns out, there's not one creator to nyx from the marketing mix. You gotta evaluate your goals and choose the right creator. And just know, I will be cheering for you every step of the way. Thank you so much.