Transcript
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.
Speaker: So let's get straight into it.
Speaker: Liam, welcome to the Moon at Dawn podcast.
Speaker: Hi Chris, thanks for having me.
Speaker: Yeah, it's great to get you back on our second podcast, new theme.
Speaker: But before we jump into the details, if you don't mind, perhaps give an overview of yourself and your current role.
Speaker: Yeah, my name is Liam Bartholomew.
Speaker: I'm VP of Marketing at Cognizm.
Speaker: Cognizm is a B2B data provider and sales intelligence platform.
Speaker: If you haven't heard of us, we're
Speaker: I have a particular specialism in Europe and a UK based company.
Speaker: And in my role as VP of marketing, I head up the content, demand gen teams, design website and customer marketing teams here at Cognizm.
Speaker: So yeah, everything that we do to go to market for new business and retention and expansion.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: Well, I'm sure most people listening to this podcast would have come across Cognizant at some point, if at the very least, on LinkedIn.
Speaker: So really interested to hear a little bit more about how Cognizant and how yourself think about B2B influencer marketing and what it means for your overarching go-to-market notion.
Speaker: Yeah, so I think when it comes to B2B, emphasis of marketing, we kind of dipped our toes in a couple years ago and really get involved in it.
Speaker: And I think what we noticed was that it was specifically in the segment where we play in our sales persona segment, where we realized that we were creating content, but we were struggling to create content with authority and scale.
Speaker: Whereas we were actually doing pretty well in our marketing segment because we were really pushing Alice, our CMO, and we were being able to create that sort of
Speaker: content with authority at scale.
Speaker: I mean, I'm looking at other companies doing the same thing, which was like Refined Labs at the time where Chris Walker had turned himself into a full blown influencer and was creating content easy at scale and it was repeatable and just churning out.
Speaker: And you could see other people doing similar things like David Gerhardt.
Speaker: And back then,
Speaker: there was actually, I'd say, fewer influencers on LinkedIn and they were holding core.
Speaker: So we thought we need to sort of we want to replicate the same.
Speaker: And at that point, we sort of Chris Walker would always talk about them as subject matter experts.
Speaker: And lots of companies had subject matter experts before.
Speaker: In fact, I've worked at one of my previous companies,
Speaker: well, two people come together, Vertex Inc.
Speaker: and Walter's Clueur, and one was in tax technology and the other was finance and risk.
Speaker: And in both of those, uh, they're very technical fields.
Speaker: So your content marketers and your marketing can't actually talk about those topics at events or in white papers or anything like that.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: because they just don't know about them.
Speaker: So they always had subject matter experts.
Speaker: But I think the difference between a subject matter expert and an influencer is in the content creation side and their presence on social and the building of a community.
Speaker: It's more than just having a subject matter expert that you can
Speaker: just interview and write up a blog or a white paper or chuck on a webinar or a podcast and they can that an influencer has more and really they have like a network that follows them and loves them and and is influenced by them right not just them it's sort of like a way of disseminating information
Speaker: So we started actually working with at that point as our SME, but we called him a brand ambassador, Ryan Razor, who is like, as he calls himself, he's a professional SDR.
Speaker: And that's when we first sort of kicked off the influencer program.
Speaker: It's kind of varied, I think, from then.
Speaker: And we now work with other influencers like Morgan Ingram and kind of how we've adapted and made it work for us.
Speaker: It's been kind of like a learning experience.
Speaker: But that's kind of how we're sort of thinking about it now.
Speaker: And I think we've done a lot of like...
Speaker: real partnerships with people rather than like one-off activity or posting and I think that's been sort of like the the main model we've got but the main reason for it is not for promotion it's to create authoritative or authoritative content at scale and that's always been sort of like the idea behind it and to be able to build a community around around that content.
Speaker: Super interesting so thinking about that evolution of
Speaker: Alice, your CMO and looking at kind of the next evolution of your influencer marketing piece, what made you land on Ryan and then Morgan?
Speaker: So I guess there was lots of due diligence, lots of different scoping, lots of different types of influencers to validate and potentially select.
Speaker: Like how and why did you land on Ryan first and foremost?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So as a little bit by chance, but I think
Speaker: But also, exactly how it works.
Speaker: We wanted to do a webinar with Josh Braun because we just liked the content he put out.
Speaker: And I suppose this is the start of how you could use influencers.
Speaker: And Josh Braun is obviously a big influencer in the cold calling space.
Speaker: He has a really unique point of view.
Speaker: He has fans that love him.
Speaker: everything he says and that that webinar went crazy so we wanted to do another webinar with josh braun uh and do the same thing and josh actually brought on ryan to help him out he recommended him uh and that webinar well we we'd partnered with um sales hacker as well and it absolutely blew up uh and then after that i think we saw some alignment with with ryan um speaking to him uh and i think
Speaker: It was just, and we realized that part of his base, his fan base that came w ith it was exactly what we were looking to grow into the US as well.
Speaker: We really wanted to get some US brand awareness out there and Brian offered it to us.
Speaker: And it wasn't in the form of like Josh where maybe that was too ambitious.
Speaker: a huge following.
Speaker: It was somewhere in the middle that we could work with.
Speaker: And, you know, Brian was willing to try it out with us as well with us basically taking over his LinkedIn and was quite excited about it.
Speaker: He was excited about the product.
Speaker: So I think that it came from one, knowing that we could work with him because we'd created content before.
Speaker: Two, that we knew that he had a following that aligned with our following and what we wanted.
Speaker: And then, yeah, and then three, that he actually was like sold into Cognizam and wanted to be part of it as well.
Speaker: And the same sort of thing happened with Morgan Ingram in that we later were going to do a webinar with Josh Braun again.
Speaker: And Josh couldn't make it that time, like sort of last minute.
Speaker: And someone recommended that we got involved, like got maybe Morgan to come get involved instead.
Speaker: So we didn't let everyone down on the webinar and cancel it.
Speaker: We just changed who it was.
Speaker: And after that, we then decided, we asked Morgan whether he wanted to, whether he'd be up for doing like
Speaker: webinars like maybe once every couple of months or something because it went really well.
Speaker: And he said, yeah, he's happy for doing free webinars with us.
Speaker: And then after a while, when we started to build up sort of consistency and passion with him, our audience loved him.
Speaker: He was bringing in his audience.
Speaker: He's got over 150,000 followers on LinkedIn.
Speaker: We realized that we actually want to make this more consistent.
Speaker: And at that point, we wanted to enter a formal partnership with him as well.
Speaker: So again, it came from testing that out, working together and seeing the best way.
Speaker: And doing the free activity first to find that alignment.
Speaker: And then you can start to obviously, and once you know that it works for you and your audience, you can go further with it.
Speaker: So this is really interesting how
Speaker: such an organic relationship has blossomed into a formal collaboration.
Speaker: So looking at how Cognizum measures success, like what are you looking for, for a successful partnership?
Speaker: Like what was it that Ryan or Morgan did or the engagement from your IACP that suggests that you needed to progress with more of a formal collaboration?
Speaker: What was you looking for?
Speaker: Yeah, we were really looking for
Speaker: just like upticks in the performance of the content that we did put out.
Speaker: So and it kind of changes as well as like right to what we're measuring.
Speaker: And then we're trying to make sure we always align with the influence of what we're trying to achieve at any one time.
Speaker: But like very much at the beginning, we just wanted to be able to it was a lot of what we were measuring around was based on just content creation and then the engagement with that content.
Speaker: So we were measuring literally
Speaker: based on things like blog views, subscriber rates to podcasts, also what guests we could get on the podcast and using the influencers ability, like an ability to get new guests on.
Speaker: We had
Speaker: Donardi run our marketing podcast for a while and he managed to get loads of good guests on and boost the profile of it.
Speaker: And now he's no longer doing the podcast for us, but we've still had that benefit for time now as he introduced it to a ton of new people.
Speaker: In the ads we're running, we'll be measuring all of that and reach an engagement rate that we're being able to
Speaker: how we're being able to penetrate the market.
Speaker: And I think the thing that I always think is important is that we can't, like, we don't, we're a sales led growth model, right?
Speaker: So we can't measure influences on just MQLs.
Speaker: Like, they're not going to bring them in.
Speaker: They're not going to bring them in directly attributed straight in.
Speaker: We can look
Speaker: at like our self-reported attribution and see if people mention, oh, I attended that show with Morgan or something like that.
Speaker: But we need to be looking really at that, how the engagement rate is that the fact that we're actually getting more people attend those webinars and not like not just sign up, but attend, but we're also increasing sign up rates.
Speaker: We're increasing our YouTube subscriber rates because all of that eventually takes back into the inbound demand we're creating.
Speaker: I think if you have and we have Casper, which is PLG,
Speaker: you can then run a full-on affiliate program where you can measure them on the affiliate links that they put out and the direct signups that they generate as well.
Speaker: But I think for us, it was all around measuring engagement and then trying to tie that back and show how that has increased inbound demand as well.
Speaker: Okay, really interesting.
Speaker: And I'm thinking about
Speaker: And you mentioned at the start how you had someone attend a webinar and I think you mentioned bringing them board for free.
Speaker: So did this initial program with both Ryan and Morgan start with a free engagement of attending a webinar and then it's blossomed into an official collaboration that I assume has a compensation assigned to it?
Speaker: Yes, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So then, and then, yeah, after, after, like, and I suppose the main reason why if you make it sort of like formal and add that side to it is to get consistency out of it.
Speaker: So then you can both be like, you know, you can outline exactly what you expect from each other and have that all contracted as well.
Speaker: So I think that's literally what it does.
Speaker: And then, you know,
Speaker: on both sides, like exactly what is needed from the relationship.
Speaker: Yeah, makes complete sense.
Speaker: So looking at the compensation, how you're looking at different influences that you work with now and in the future, what elements influence how you compensate your different partners?
Speaker: I assume it's like following, what they're committing to produce for you.
Speaker: Is there anything else that you kind of tie to that compensation?
Speaker: Yeah, so to be honest, it's like always a negotiation.
Speaker: So I think we have a lot on like based on the content production.
Speaker: So like the value that that will hold to us.
Speaker: And then we have that.
Speaker: And then you also look at like the sphere that they can influence in.
Speaker: So then when we are reporting back to the influencer, we're looking at like those, we're looking at those engagement metrics, being able to report back the impact that it's had there.
Speaker: And I think that also provides you an idea of the value that they're bringing to the business.
Speaker: And in any ways that we can, we'll try and bring in direct revenue impact as well where we can.
Speaker: So it might be people mentioning the webinars that they've been on in self-reported attribution.
Speaker: It might be that sometimes we have Morgan actually help with in-op
Speaker: like situations where he comes on and create and does content with like companies in ops and stuff.
Speaker: So we can look at conversion rates in the funnel of those opportunities and things like that.
Speaker: So I think there's sort of multiple ways.
Speaker: I think at the beginning, it's like, I don't know if there's like a solid like price book, but I'd be like, this means that we'll give you that much.
Speaker: It's like in the same way that you would go up to
Speaker: a company that's offering to do webinars with you, if I was to be really basic and they might give you a media pack and put a value on it, you kind of do the same, I think, with the influencer and you have to come to an agreement there.
Speaker: And so it's not like we have standard terms and thing and say one post is this much and nor have I ever received that back in the same way.
Speaker: It's been kind of open.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: you can and probably in short, like in small, like, like relationships be like one post is X amount of dollars.
Speaker: And it could possibly work, but in the way that we're working, it's a bit more of a partnership.
Speaker: So yeah, it's a bit more like, I suppose, hashed out.
Speaker: No, no, it makes complete sense.
Speaker: And so I think,
Speaker: With the position that Cognizum is, they're far more recognized.
Speaker: You're a startup, but people will be more familiar with Cognizum.
Speaker: You're a much more established marketing team.
Speaker: But for those folks that are perhaps early on in their journey, perhaps there's a one-man band, octopus-style marketeer doing everything, but they want to venture into influencer marketing, perhaps don't have the budget,
Speaker: is there anything that you would recommend?
Speaker: And I think you've alluded to it with perhaps the webinar piece, but is there anything that you would recommend for those folks who are starting off who perhaps don't have the budget to work with some of those larger influencers?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I would be like, you don't need to have, you don't need to be paying an influencer to work with you consistently and be part of your team and,
Speaker: that's basically what we've got.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then they're on Slack.
Speaker: They're basically there and you get the value that you need.
Speaker: And it's like, it's like having someone that influence of being the company really.
Speaker: They join us for like content, like brainstorming calls, everything like it's, it's great.
Speaker: But really when sometimes when we do some of our big launches,
Speaker: of campaigns or products and stuff, we leverage influences that we've just built relationship with.
Speaker: Maybe we've done odd bits of work with them before, or maybe we just have like done a lot of that, that relationship building on LinkedIn through other people.
Speaker: And then you can actually get them to like, like do the stuff for you for free.
Speaker: And it's all just based on a relation, a mutual relationship.
Speaker: And, you know, it might come back the same way.
Speaker: I think when we, we did a campaign where we, um,
Speaker: obviously, which was the diary of a CMO, which was a book that Alice wrote.
Speaker: And then we launched all over LinkedIn and we activated it through a ton of influencers.
Speaker: And most of them were just based on relationships.
Speaker: We worked with Gitano on our SEO.
Speaker: We worked with him as an SEO consultant and we did a bit of like, we had done some influencing with him as well before, but then we also got...
Speaker: We worked with Todd Klauser and Abed Durrani on our content program, but we're no longer working with them at that point, but we still have that sort of relationship.
Speaker: And then through that, we were able to push it out through some people from Refine Labs as well that we'd previously worked with.
Speaker: And then each of them all introduced us to other people who are willing to promote it if we sent them a copy of the book.
Speaker: So it's
Speaker: we sort of like grew and blew that up.
Speaker: And it's exactly the same way when we've tried to activate different sales campaigns that we're planning to launch as well.
Speaker: So there's actually going to be a launch of another campaign, I think, well, later this half of the year.
Speaker: And we're going to run that same idea and sort of get it promoted by Influences free.
Speaker: And it's kind of a bit like, you know, I'll scratch you about your scratch mind.
Speaker: You might go on them.
Speaker: put people on their podcasts, you might join a webinar with them, and it just becomes a big network.
Speaker: And I don't think it all has to be paid for at all.
Speaker: I think the paid for bit to me is brings consistency.
Speaker: Otherwise, you can actually get a lot just from building a network.
Speaker: Yeah, I think this network influencer effect, I think it's going to play a more prominent role over the next 6, 12 and 18 months.
Speaker: And more and more brands are going to be leaning into building their own in-house committee of influencers that they can engage exactly how you reference.
Speaker: So in the absence of a free book or that wider presence, what else do you think can you do to entice those folks to be part of that network?
Speaker: Because
Speaker: trying to get someone to engage for free when there's not an obvious compensation benefit is a little bit trickier.
Speaker: So for perhaps a more unknown brand, what is it you think you could do to kind of entice those people?
Speaker: Is it being part of content, helping them with their PR, participating articles, being part of a kind of content engine?
Speaker: Is that what you think you need to lean towards to get those early advocates as part of your program?
Speaker: Yeah, I think the content plays into a big part of it, right?
Speaker: Because they're like the early stages of cognizant, you like there was no incentive really to come on a webinar with us.
Speaker: And like, yeah, we can try and prove that we can get like X number of people to the webinar or we can damage.
Speaker: Yeah, try and show how we will distribute something.
Speaker: But that's about it.
Speaker: That's why I think if you come to someone with a really good
Speaker: idea on content, things that they think would be exciting and they can repurpose for themselves.
Speaker: That's your end.
Speaker: And then you build the relationship and from the relationship, you can get a lot further, like a lot of people as well.
Speaker: Like there's a lot of influences, right?
Speaker: That work at companies, right?
Speaker: So they're not going to be
Speaker: they can't advocate for products in the same way.
Speaker: And even people who like go up on their own, like consulting or something, they might not want to be like super tied to a product, not like in B2C influencing.
Speaker: So I think all of it comes down to the exciting content that you can create.
Speaker: And then that benefits everyone.
Speaker: No matter if you're a small company or not, because they'll use that content with that, with their reach and what you want to do is then benefit from it.
Speaker: So as lame as that sounds, probably to say it's content.
Speaker: But whichever thing is content, I think that's the end.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I'm seeing it from, and we talked this before we started recording, it's what I'm seeing people engage with when you reach out to people you don't know.
Speaker: That kind of being part of a content element is far more appealing than just how are you doing?
Speaker: We have synergies in this chat.
Speaker: So just a couple of questions.
Speaker: Is there anyone...
Speaker: within your sphere who is inspiring you with your own influencer program?
Speaker: You kind of referenced Refine Labs, who most people would know.
Speaker: But is there anyone else, like Apollo, maybe a competitor, a competitor of yours, but is there anyone else in the sphere that you think is doing something really, really interesting in this space as well?
Speaker: Yeah, I think Apollo are doing a great job.
Speaker: Like, or should I say it?
Speaker: I might get out.
Speaker: be out there on LinkedIn.
Speaker: I think Apollo came after us and they potentially are doing a really good job now, but they, I felt like we were on the way before they were, but I obviously see them everywhere on LinkedIn and they they're nailing it now.
Speaker: I've seen like a loads of things where they're working with lots of different influences as well.
Speaker: So yeah, do respect them and obviously very watching them closely.
Speaker: And, and, and like, I think what they've managed to do with this like community aspect is, is
Speaker: it was really cool.
Speaker: Um, I think previously we've seen other companies do well at it and like B2B marketing and like hockey stack, uh, also do a really good job of it from, um, a small team as well.
Speaker: So they're, they're really punching above their weight, uh, in that sense.
Speaker: And then there's been other companies like lavender.ai have done a really good job of it, uh, in the past and had loads of, and worked for lots of different influences, um, as well.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: I think at various different times, what I would say, and this could even account for us to some extent, is that like a lot of companies seem to have peaks and troughs of it, right?
Speaker: And I think this is where you have like these partnerships with influencers and it's a lot of noise for a long time and then it dies down.
Speaker: And I think you can do these big activation pieces where it's like,
Speaker: you make someone an advisor, or I don't know, or give them something to post about, but it can all appear a bit random until, and I think what I think is going to be the real impressive things is when a company makes it and does it completely consistently.
Speaker: So if I think about Lavender, for example, they were big, got Will, Aiken, Jen, I forgot the second name, but Jen on there and also
Speaker: Todd and Will have now left.
Speaker: And then they kind of died down from my feed now.
Speaker: I don't see it so much.
Speaker: ArkySec had lots of people join and stuff, but I don't see them all in the same way now on my feed.
Speaker: I think some people have left as well.
Speaker: And Apollo, lots of activation from some things, but it's a bit random.
Speaker: I don't see anything, anyone consistently, any infants and consistently out there wrapping
Speaker: Apollo and I think personally that's the next level and um of it and like I suppose that's what we've tried to do with Morgan a bit but like would like to you know those are the sort of things I think where you could go even further and what we've tried to do with our own staff actually internally as well is try and build them to be real consistent um like a real consistent presence so how do you um
Speaker: Well, how are you thinking about future proofing your own influencer programs at Cognizant?
Speaker: So I think a lot of the examples that you referenced there were based on people exiting the business and influencers and ambassadors being built internally and people move on, people go on to new types of career changes.
Speaker: So what are Cognizant doing to kind of future proof that consistency?
Speaker: We're trying to build, the thing that you have to do is
Speaker: is future people by building loads and also having multiple relationships.
Speaker: So I think the problem is as well, if you buy someone in, who's already got that relationship, like if you look to Lavender, I feel like I'm digging companies out.
Speaker: I don't mean it like this, but if you listen, they bring in Todd and you bring in Will, then that is a huge bulk.
Speaker: But then when that leaves, they go and like you, it's like, they definitely built up stuff around their founders as well, but
Speaker: That feels like a big loss.
Speaker: I think what we're trying to do is build from the ground up, multiple people in the departments and you won't see like we've got rev ups, sales, marketing being our key personas and we've tried to build up me, Fran,
Speaker: Alice, Chanbeck when he was with us, but now he's gone to HockeyStack.
Speaker: It's like, we still got the other three of us, so it's okay.
Speaker: And then we've got like Dave, Benfordman Sales, plus James, our CEO, posting, plus John Islett, who's VP of Sales.
Speaker: And then we're building out all of these profiles at the same time.
Speaker: And for operations, we've got our COO posting now.
Speaker: We started posting from our head of RevOps as well.
Speaker: you kind of spread your risk and spread your bets.
Speaker: And then work with externals as well.
Speaker: So we've worked with many different externals over the time.
Speaker: But hopefully when people have moved on, done their own things, like Ryan moved on, we've had Morgan.
Speaker: We stopped doing the same influencer activity with Catano, but we built Alice up.
Speaker: to maybe compensate a bit for that.
Speaker: And even though we still work with Gutano anyway.
Speaker: So I think, yeah, I think there's ways of spreading your bets.
Speaker: I hope anyone listening
Speaker: One final question before I let you go.
Speaker: So just thinking about kind of the next iteration, you've talked about creating networks, you've talked about consistency, the opportunities.
Speaker: Is there anything else where you think B2B influencers marketing is going to go over the next six, nine, 12, 15, 18 months that you're quite interested in?
Speaker: Yeah, I think
Speaker: I'm not sure actually.
Speaker: I feel like it's becoming more and more prevalent.
Speaker: I feel like at least now people are, and we see companies that do it, doing it well, doing it really well and starting to like, and make an impact.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like the Apollo's like hockey stack.
Speaker: I'm unsure about the direction it's going to go.
Speaker: And I think the,
Speaker: The key thing to me is whether if there's either tech or a company that makes it really big and makes it consistent.
Speaker: So I think obviously there's so many
Speaker: different avenues you can go down in B2C and inactivating instances.
Speaker: And I wonder, I just think there's a lot of work still to be done from B2B and whether someone, if like a company, like maybe a platform, truly manages to commodify on LinkedIn.
Speaker: That's, yeah, I don't know if that's a bit of a waffly answer, but I'm not, basically.
Speaker: It's a good answer and very much aligned my side.
Speaker: So, Salim, I just want to say thank you for coming on.
Speaker: tons of insight from me personally.
Speaker: So yeah, thanks for coming on and we'll be sharing this on the, all of the information on the show notes.
Speaker: Thanks again, Ian.
Speaker: Cheers.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Bye-bye.
