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Product Led Growth strategies should be leaning into influencer marketing
8 Plays3 months ago
Chris interviews Michelle Teo, the founder of Demand Conversion, a growth marketing agency for B2B SaaS companies. We delved into various aspects of applications in go-to-market motions for different types of clients, we talked about lots of broad conversations like the role of brand, using influencers to drive performance, remuneration, tactical considerations plus a ton more!
5 things you’ll learn.
- The Strategic Role: We discussed how influencer marketing fits into the go-to-market strategies of B2B companies, emphasizing its importance in building trust and delivering key messages to target audiences.
- Influencer Marketing for Conversion Goals: We discussed how influencer marketing can be particularly effective for product-led growth (PLG) motions, especially for companies with lower ACVs.
- Collaboration Channels: Michelle highlights the key channels she uses when working with B2B influencers. LinkedIn, YouTube, newsletters, and podcasts are her stable go-to channel mix.
- Creating Effective Campaigns: It starts with a strong briefing process and understanding the influencer's working style and tailoring specific talking points to align with their clients campaign goals.
- Incentivised Alignment: Campaigns performance better when all parties are aligned with the incentivises being shared.
Favourite quote - "Fundamentally, I see influencer marketing as a channel where you can deliver the key messages that you want your target audience to hear.”
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Transcript
Introduction to B2B Influencer Marketing
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Moon at Dawn podcast where we interview B2B marketing leaders to help understand how they think, plan and activate B2B influencer marketing campaigns. So let's get straight into it. Michelle, welcome to the Moon at Dawn podcast. Great. Thanks, Chris, for having me. Yeah, Michelle, we've um been speaking on LinkedIn. We spoke a couple of months ago and I'm delighted that we've been able to get you onto the podcast. I think before we get into it, it'd be great just to get an introduction to yourself and what you do.
Michelle's Role and Strategic Insights
00:00:37
Speaker
Alrighty, I'm Michelle, I'm the founder of Demand Conversion. We're a growth marketing agency for B2B SaaS companies, including product-led growth motions and sales assisted. And we specialize in conversion rate optimization and experimentation. And that experimentation can include partnerships, influencer marketing, community marketing. Perfect. but Well, we spoke a couple of months ago and we spoke about influencer marketing. You had some really interesting experience with it. So I think to kick off this conversation, I'd love to get a view of how you think about influencer marketing for a strategic lens and the role it plays with a go-to market notion with the types of clients that you work with. Well,
00:01:23
Speaker
Fundamentally, I see influencer marketing as a channel where you can deliver the key messages that you want your target audience to hear. But I think this is added layer into it. Nowadays, in B2B, we see people, buyers, really buying from people that they trust. And that can be a from a first degree connection, people that they know and trust or people from a third degree connection. Never met them before, but they know them, they trust them, industry leader. And so I think when you look at that, and influencer marketing becomes a very viable and interesting channel to explore. Now where in terms of where does it fit in the GTM? ah and so In terms of where does it fit um depending on the GTM motion that you have? I think
00:02:08
Speaker
You have to really look at where you would strategically want to place influencer marketing and what role you'd want it to have. For example, if you've got a PLG motion, a very low ACV, a single decision maker, you've got ah um and you've got a free trial experience, for example, you could let essentially leverage influencer marketing to a specific conversion goal. However, if you've got a company which is targeting medium to enterprise sized companies as a buying committee of like 10 to 15 personas, your sales cycle is six months, you could look at influencer marketing to create brand or you could target specific personas and deliver the key messages you want through through these through these channels. Interesting. interesting
00:02:53
Speaker
so You mentioned there about conversion goals and how you can look within specific maybe product growth companies where conversions might be more of an appealing objective. So can you talk me through how you've looked at influencer marketing through more of a conversion bottom of the funnel approach?
Effectiveness of Influencer Marketing for Conversions
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think that once again, I think this works really well when you've got a PLG motion where you've got a lower ACV and you've got a really compelling offer, a really great free trial of so sort some sort of freemium experience.
00:03:26
Speaker
and so I think with that you can really create brand and you can really push for that conversion goal at the same time when you do an influencer collaboration. So actually some of our clients right now, one of the top ways that they generate signups is through influencer marketing. And so that can be leveraged through multiple channels where um in terms of the influencer space, whether that's on LinkedIn, YouTube, newsletters, podcasts, and things like that. I see in terms of B2B influencer marketing, I see that all these different channels make up the ecosystem of what a true B2B influencer market marketer really really is nowadays.
00:04:05
Speaker
So interesting. So thinking about that playing out into an actual program, you mentioned their podcast and looking at how you leverage their face in some of the marketing mix. When thinking about that specific campaign, we don't have to reveal the client, but how did you, did the brief look like? And then actually how did that transcend into an actual campaign that went live? What did that look like? Yeah, that's a really great question. I think all influencers work really differently. Some really like to have the post or the key messages written out for them. And so they do very little work. And some really like to have a very heavy say in how they're going to present the product, what key messages they're going to do, how like how they want to review the product.
00:04:52
Speaker
So I think at the end of the day, it's all about understanding who you're collaborating with and how they like to work. But at the very least, you always need a very strong influencer briefing note with what you shouldn't say, what you should say, some of the key messages, examples, and demos, and product information. And I think it's also important to have very specific talking points for each influencer, depending on on what you want to achieve with them. Interesting. So, so thinking about some of your experiences, what have you seen work really, really well when you've had this holistic brief, you've had this view of how you want to go to market with the influencer strategy? What are some of the tactics that work really, really well? In terms of
Tactics and Testing in Influencer Campaigns
00:05:38
Speaker
tactics, do you mean like the actual implementation and the, yeah, the implementation and the activation? Was there anything that worked particularly well on one client that perhaps didn't on another?
00:05:50
Speaker
Or is there be some consistencies with what you've seen work really, really well? So giving an influencer more ownership and autonomy to create that to create that that message. Is there a particular creative concept that works really, really well? Is there a ah medium like podcasts or is there webinars? Is there anything that works really, really well or has worked really, really well to date? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think it really depends wildly on who your target audience is, your target persona, how they like to consume information, how ah the length of information that they like to consume nowadays, whether it's a 15 second video or a 30 minute podcast.
00:06:31
Speaker
And I also think it's really important to consider the key, the the objective of what you're trying to achieve. Is this a brand awareness campaign or are you trying to do an in-depth comparison against a competitor? So I think it's important to take all those things into account. But I do want to note that sometimes you know it's important to really get out there and experiment and test because we have run campaigns before for example where we wanted to run um straight to conversion to a sign-up and we partnered with a whole host of YouTube influencers and two in particular they had looked to have very similar audiences we gave them the exact same brief they both had 300,000 followers they both had successfully executed
00:07:14
Speaker
strong partnerships and collaborations in the past so we knew that they would be good partners to work with and Interestingly enough all this particular product that we were looking at one influencer generated an insane amount of signups like we were just blown away and the other was really just a trickle and they both had a dedicated 10-minute video to it so I think that sometimes it's really important to have a very like as a good size of influencers that you want to test with because sometimes you can't ever really predict how something's going to to really go. I think a lot of it really depends with cred um on the credibility of the influencer on the specific product that they are talking about and how much their audience thinks, okay, you know, like,
00:08:01
Speaker
I really trust this person for these types of recommendations. And so I'm going to I'm going to really roll with that. So I think it's also important to consider who you're targeting and the type of channel that's going to work best. So we find that when we're targeting highly sophisticated decision makers, multiple six figure salaries, You know, they're probably not going to be on YouTube as much. And so we we see that they really like to consume very high quality content. And so when we roll out influence ah influencer marketing campaigns to target these sorts of
00:08:35
Speaker
buyers, it really has to match that. Whereas, um you know, if you've got like a, once again, a PLG motion, low ACV, really quick time to value. That's when you can look at um channels maybe with shorter content consumption formats, like like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and and things like that. Interesting. So just staying on this point of the YouTube activation, when you dissect it, The performance, you touched on, you know, one performing particularly well versus another what on face value seem to be ah the same type of influencer. But you mentioned that there was a whole host of other influencers were tested in that campaign. Outside of what was it that you thought really drive performance for that particular influencer? And why do you think in that example that actually maybe some of the other influencers didn't work as well? Did you did
Aligning Incentives and Compensation Structures
00:09:29
Speaker
you have a view?
00:09:30
Speaker
on that on ah on a higher level or some of the individual use cases? Yeah, look, on the outset, I think that you can see, all right, all these influencers talk about Fintech, all of these influencers talk about finance, and business finances, and so on. but I think that there are nuances in these types of audiences and also I think that the way that messages are delivered makes a huge difference into the perceived value of a product. So I think one influencer just really, really nailed it and I think his audience was very, very receptive to it.
00:10:09
Speaker
um On top of that, I think um one point that I didn't mention before is that I think having aligned incentives is really, really important. What we do see having an impact is when um compensation. if it's We like to have aligned incentives and we find that the um the campaigns that perform the best is when everyone's incentives are really aligned. And so I know a lot of influencers prefer to be paid like flat fee. um and some just say no outright to commission or affiliate marketing type structures.
00:10:44
Speaker
But I think if you can really work to come up with a payment structure or compensation structure, which looks really good, for example, like if you're, if a company can afford to pay like $1,000 per sign up and say to an influencer with an audience of 300K followers, all of them, who would be a good fit for this? Hey, like look, this is what we can give you. What we definitely see is that they really, really think very carefully about how to present the messages um to their audience, which is a lot more effective, actually, than an outsider coming out, like coming from the outside and saying, hey, present it this way. I haven't made content to that audience, you know, every single day for the last three years. Influencers really know what is going to perform best for their audiences. So this is really interesting. and I want to talk about that compensation piece. So so do you go with, a do you do you have it a little bit more collaborative?
00:11:39
Speaker
with the fee or do you ask them what their fee is or do you go tell them based on what you've done on your own jujitsu? So looking at their audience and do you have an idea of what you're, you're willing to pay? And then do you agree on, is it because you kind of alluded to that paying influences on affiliate based model is somewhat somewhat tricky, but actually trying to engineer a bit more of for an incentive to compliment maybe a set fee. So, so how does that structure look like? Do you have a hybrid or is it just a case of yeah know Let's work out what your baseline rate is and then work out what you're actually going to do. And then that's what we'll look at as your set fee. How does that compensation look like?
00:12:18
Speaker
Yeah, so from the outset, we always have a really strong idea of the cost of acquisition ranges we want to sit in and what's going to be ah like lowest we're willing to pay, of course, and the highest that we are willing to go. And we normally come in at you know somewhere in between that range with an influencer and influencers. um Most of them, when they have been working in the field for a very long time and we try to work with more mature influencers who are used to collaborations rather than first time influencers, we find that doesn't work as well. Um, they normally have their immediate kit and rates and ways that they prefer to work. So some are open to commission payment structures, depending, and also really depending on what you offer. Like in this day and age, if you say, Hey, we're willing to pay like, you know, $10 for signup.
00:13:04
Speaker
don't really interest most influencers, especially in B2B. You have to have a very, very large audience, which is unusual. And also in B2B, we're not necessarily just going for audience size. We're really looking for how much does this audience trust this particular influencer? So that the strength of that bond and that relationship that they have with their community. um And so ideally, I do love to have a commission baked in. And the reason is, once again, aligned incentives. Most influencers have multiple channels that they work on. Like, for example, they're not normally just on LinkedIn or just on YouTube. They normally have multiple channels like newsletters, Instagrams, podcasts and things like that. When you work with a commission structure payment, they work really hard on their own to make sure it's pushed out everywhere, really well executed.
00:13:55
Speaker
Just fine. um I find on a flat fee, you have to real um have to really go through and be like, okay, these are the channels, what are we going to pay you for each channel and things like that? And I find that the quality of the execution is not is not as um not as great, in my honest opinion. so I do really like to try and build that um aligned incentive in, but, you know, some influencers just just kind of like, look, we just don't do commission payments straight off the bat. We just prefer a one off payment. That's what we want. And so, you know, we just then see if that fits within our ah ranges.
00:14:29
Speaker
Interesting, okay, so I wanna shift gears a little bit. um So it sounds like you've had a few different executions, a few different campaigns. Is there anything that's on your agenda that you're really interested in exploring next for influencer marketing and where you perhaps have not had the right brief, the right client, but is there anything that you've seen someone else do you think, okay, this is this is interesting, and I wanna do this next? Yeah, you know, I think really large companies like the big sort of like corporate tech companies out there have leveraged evangelism and ambassadorship really, really well. And up until recently, I don't think that's really been very accessible to smaller companies and smaller startups for many reasons, including resources, time.
00:15:17
Speaker
sorry, you name it. um I think
Creative Collaborations and Execution
00:15:19
Speaker
with this explosion of influencer marketing on the landscape, it's made these sorts of collaborations and partnerships a lot more accessible. So I would love to have more creative um more creative collaborations where we work with an influencer to perhaps go to a conference and and represent a specific company or um do a panel talk and represent a specific product and really make that interaction a little little bit more authentic and organic in the community. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. enough I've seen, I've seen different businesses leverage influencers at events and who go and interview people, record their sessions and create unique content. And that's, that's seemingly worked really, really nicely as a piece of ah content after. So really, really nice. Okay. So thinking about.
00:16:11
Speaker
some of your own personal learning. So maybe like B2B marketers who haven't done influencer marketing before, what would be some of the, I guess, tips and advice that you would do to help them come out the bay out the gate with their influencer programs? Yeah, sir so influencer marketing and influencer programs are one thing where execution is really everything. You need to have on point execution because if you partner with an influencer with subpar execution, that's going to be reflected in your results. You're going to have, you know, really very high acquisition costs and the company is going to say, hey, look,
00:16:47
Speaker
This experiment is really not working for us. And so I think if you want to experiment with it and you want to make it work, you really need to focus on on point execution. And so there are a couple of points, there are a couple of stages where I think um a lot of companies don't really think about when first trying out a program. The first is actually reaching out to influencers. I've seen this multiple times now. You need to know how to reach out to them in a way where they're going to see the value in the collaboration, otherwise they're not going to respond to you and you need to look like a very credible partner straight off the bat because you know these guys get
00:17:26
Speaker
DMs and emails day in day out and half of them aren't going to be very valuable to them. And so you need to, you know, you need to be able to actually reach them. So that's a common complaint that I've heard. And actually I've seen myself in trying to scale up programs with people with never within house resources that have never really done it frequently is that response rates can be low if you are not structuring the right message straight off the bat. The second thing is due diligence. It's not really just about full account or Um. you know, follow a couch or how good that they seem on video, you really need to do a lot of due diligence in like, okay, so they can create content and build an audience, but can they actually present your product or actually present them at key messages you want them to present in a very engaging way that resonates with their audience? And these are actually two very different skillsets. There are a lot of creators out there who are creators and they can create amazing content. Well, I think what really, really differentiates ah an influencer that you want to work with and and a creator is that an influencer knows
00:18:28
Speaker
how to sell. An employer knows how to sell and present the benefits, unique value prop, how to show that to the audience. And you can see that even with creators with the same size profile and community, their skill sets in this can be really, really different. So it's really important to have a look at previous collaborations that they've done before and and just see like how successful were they. And the third is getting the getting the structure formalizing the structure in a very, very tight way. You want to have a really, really tight legal agreement. I know that some.
00:19:03
Speaker
like some folks when they just run this straight off the bat they don't do it with any legal agreements it's just sort of a formal like informal email shot here and then they're like okay we'll pay this but you know with these sorts of arrangements especially with commission involved um and if you've never worked with this influencer before you want to really know like okay how many iterations on their content are you going to agree to have them do if you're not happy with the one first one straight off the batch like straight off whatever straight Um, yeah um, like typically would have like two iterations baked into the contract. Um, when they're going to deliver is also really important if they're not delivering by a certain date, you know, what are the penalties? And, um, you know, just, just things like that, I think are really important and also not removing the content once it's been posted, you know, little things like this. I think it's important to have, um, a very strong legal contract governing both parties.
00:19:59
Speaker
app so Absolutely. um So I wanted to discuss around, we are seeing, and and we spoke about this offline, more momentum, more people talking about influencer marketing, more people There's more content being shared, more thought leadership, more opinions on it. But still, when you start to speak to different marketeers, actually there's not as a much it not as much adoption based on the traction that I'm seeing in market. So what
Challenges and Future of B2B Influencer Marketing
00:20:28
Speaker
do you think is preventing or holding back marketeers from starting to test and understand the world of B2B influencer marketing?
00:20:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a really great question. I think there's two sort of trends that I see. The first is that, um especially in tech and the startup world with the current layoffs that we've seen, I think a lot of companies um with right sizing head counts and things like that. I think teams are a lot smaller nowadays, but the the goals and the quotas that they have haven't haven't gone down. And so I think that a lot of teams are very, very hard at work. And when you have daily pressure to constantly deliver, it's very difficult to try and you know take that time out to try and launch something new to try and experiment with something. So that's one issue that I see. And then the next issue actually is that I think there's still a perception that influencer marketing is like this B2C thing.
00:21:30
Speaker
with like connotations of fashion and beauty and that it doesn't really translate you know them with 50 like with but with them with decision makers who are 50 years old who are like CTOs or CPOs or who work in large tech companies but the thing is that in this day and age everyone is consuming content I mean, you know, some of these, you know, some people, parents are also on TikTok. Everyone's consuming content somewhere. And so I think B2B marketing is very relevant, but it's just a case of being able to show that, okay, perhaps being on TikTok is not really one of the channels you want to be on, but showing that, okay, your audience is is consuming content and these are the channels that they're actually consuming on. So therefore, you know, it would be strategic to also be on them as well. Great.
00:22:20
Speaker
answer. But my last question is, what do you think the short term future for B2B influencer marketing is and short term being 6, 12, 18 months? What do you think? um Where do you think it's going? I think we are going to see a lot more companies leverage influencer marketing in many ways. I think community marketing in general is exploding with Slack groups and Slack groups and newsletters and things like that. And so I think it's only natural that influencer marketing continues on the rise. I think as we move on, the industry is going to mature. I think there's been a lot of infrastructure built for the B2C world in terms of influencer marketing. And I don't think this infrastructure necessarily transfers to the B2B world. And let me give you an example for like platforms and agencies, platforms with B2C marketers
00:23:20
Speaker
very, very different types of influencers. Sorry, B2C platforms for influencer marketing, very different types of influencers are on there. And um it's not as easy or credible for a B2B influencer with a serious willing to, you know, want to join one of these platforms and do campaigns with them. It's just not it's not really the same, Brad. It's not really the same vibe. I think B2B is going to see its own sort of infrastructure pop up. in that space and I have spoken to a lot of folks who are building tools to come in and and try and solve this. I think at the end of the day what we're seeing also is a ah difference in the way that people want to buy compared to previous years, especially B2B buyers. I think that it's becoming a lot more self-serve. They're doing a lot more researching of the company before they get in touch with the company and I think that
00:24:16
Speaker
it's only natural that we're going to see the space evolve and influence the marketing really play a larger role in how and how ah buyers are going to to look at buying in the future.
00:24:30
Speaker
Fascinating.
Conclusion and Farewell
00:24:31
Speaker
And I agree. I think this is ah an evolving space, but one that's evolving very, very quickly. So we're going to see lots of different agencies, services, vendors, platforms, tech, all kind of pop in and out over the next kind of few years. So really, really interested to see how this all evolves. So Michelle. Thank you for coming on, super interesting, lots of soundbites that I've logged here and can't wait to share all of this content and all of your different opinions and views of everyone. Thanks so much, Chris, appreciate it. Thanks, Michelle. Cheers.