Host (5:31)

So if you were going to build a B2B program from scratch today with everything. You know what? I think the first three things you do to make it work.

Sarah (5:45)

It'S a Good question. The first thing I think, and this is like a process that you would need to do is research, research, research to spend time, enough time to really immerse yourself in this niche in the market that you're focusing on, to really be part of the conversation and to like, I don't mean to participate but I mean to be there, to be listening, to be aware of who people are listening to, what are people saying, in other words, who are the relevant influences. So I think it all starts with that research and you really need to. I don't think there's a shortcut. I mean I'm not aware of a shortcut and I don't think looking for a shortcut is a good idea because it takes time to really be part of that. So I would first of all really immerse myself and spend. I mean it could take days really. That's definitely number one. Number two I think is to identify the different communities or outlets, like not just the influencers themselves that you should be partnering with. And then I'd say the third thing, once you've done the research, you've identified who the key players are, is to actually start reaching out to them before you have a plan, that's okay, but just to start talking to them and understand like how do they work with brands today, what do they do, doing what's working, how much do they charge, like to get a real idea before you even start to budget, just to understand what you're working with, what the potential is, what are the options because you'll be very smart after those steps.

Host (7:24)

I know it's like the research part and for everything so important because the influencer space is so non transparent. Everybody has different rates, everybody has different styles, everybody has different working styles, everybody puts out different pieces of content and you have to navigate that process. But a question I had for you is how do you choose the right influencers in B2B? Are you looking for followers? Engagement, Content, quality, niche, expertise? What is your like stack rank on like criteria you're looking for?

Sarah (7:59)

So to answer that question, there's a question that you need to ask before which is what is your goal? Right. So for us our goal is brand awareness, which means that if I'm looking at influencers and influencer content, what matters to me is the reach that they get. So less the following, I care about their reach. So how many, you know, average views are they getting on their posts? Engagement, who's engaging with them? Right. If my goal is brand awareness, for example, so the things that I Look at, okay, and this is, you know, some things here are relevant for B2B as. For B2C as well. But I'm going to highlight the ones that are most relevant for B2B. So number one is their title. What is it that they do? Right? Because if they, I'll give you an example. If I'm doing a campaign and I want to target web designers on LinkedIn, okay? So their profession is super important to me and that could be something that, that for B2C is overlooked. Okay? So the profession, it has to be within the niche, right? Otherwise it just doesn't make sense to work with them. Then there's the yes, following is, is interesting, but it's not a deal maker or breaker. What is, are the average views that they get and the engagement that they get. So let's say we're ticking the boxes. You know, they've got the right profession, they've got the right numbers. Then I dive into the content itself. Now I'm not looking for high, high, high quality. Let's talk about, let's say video, right? So I'm not looking for high, high, high. Fine, fine, fine. Content, right? Because that's not the point. The point is they need to be authentic, they need to be relatable. So it's okay to have, not only okay, it's advisable to have to be working with different influences, with different styles, right? You don't want everyone to look like your brand and your content and that's for you to do with your ads and on your social channels. But when you're working with influencers, you want those unique styles because each style like that attracts different audience, like different following and viewers, which are relevant for you. So I deep dive into the content and I'm looking for that authenticity for that unique style. And, and in terms of like quality of the content, obviously it needs to be clear, you know, good audio or whatever, but not nothing too polished. So those are the things I look at. And if I, if it ticks all the boxes, if I like everything that I see, that's when obviously we'll reach out. So that's pretty much the process.

Host (10:52)

I, you talked about a little bit about things you're looking for content wise, like the quality of audio, like it doesn't have to be this. So I want to go talk a little bit about the brief. I think this is like one of like the, also the most like tricky things to get right because you don't want to like stifle the, the creativity of a Creator because they know the audience. But you also have to like be in some guardrails of what your, your brand, especially if you're a bigger brand, you have to be in some guardrail. So what is like a brief look like to you when you're briefing a creator and saying, I want to do X with the creator?

Sarah (11:35)

Yeah, the brief is, is very important and I give like a good example that I think is kind of easy to understand and imagine. But I say imagine that, you know, you found this influencer and you're, and you're stepping into a car with the influence of the influencers driving. He's at the driver's seat and you, the brand are sitting at the back and you give the, you give the driver your, your brief, which is essentially the destination, right? So you want to be very clear as to what the destination is. In other words, what do you want? What should the end product be? Right? What are your goals? You want to raise brand awareness. Is it a specific feature you want them to talk about? But then you shut up and let them drive sort of thing like you let them decide according to, you know, after all, they are content creators, this is what they do best. They know their audience better than you do. So to let them get there freely, so to give them the creative freedoms, in other words, we give the boundaries of what the kind of do's and don'ts and try and make it as clear as possible, as brief as possible, hence the name brief, and to not interfere. So it's very important to give the creative freedom, but just to make sure that from the get go, so before they start creating, it's clear to them what success looks like and means to you. Right? So for example, if it's a brand awareness campaign, focusing on a specific product, launch or feature and you'll be measuring and impressions is the most important thing. Right? No hard call to action at the end. I just want people to, I want them to stop scrolling and get a aha. Moment. Right? So when the creator knows that in advance, like it's, it's clear to them or it's easier for them to understand and be aligned with what is expected.

Host (13:35)

I love the name. I think you nailed it. I think so many people forget that the word brief means brief and they, it's so really funny because I've seen briefs that are, I would say books. I would say like, you can't say this. You can see this, you can say this, this is not Rod. And it turns into you just basically saying something and then they and then they come back and say, why is this not performing? And it's like, well, you're basically saying what we should say to our audience. That not even in our voice, tone of voice, just in your tone of voice. And you expect them to care what you say. I think one thing that I like you to pull back the curtain a little bit is like, how do you negotiate these influencer contracts when there's like no standard, like industry rate card for things?

Sarah (14:29)

Very challenging.

Host (14:30)

Yeah. What, like, could you give like a little example of like what averages go for? So people like, who are doing some campaigns, they should know like, yeah, yeah, if I'm doing this, this is what I should be charging.

Sarah (14:45)

Yeah. So obviously a very good question. And I often talk about it on LinkedIn. Like in my posts. I share real numbers and pricing now, pricing, I've learned a lot about it the hard way. Slowly, slowly, from campaign to campaign. Looking back at, I mean, it's difficult for me to look back at like the first deals I did, like as a brand, like the agreements that we had and the amount of money we paid, because it just makes me like want to throw up. It takes quite a few campaigns to understand like what the ranges are in your niche. Like, it does vary from niche to niche for sure. So for me to, I compare price, like I do share pricing that we're seeing in various platforms on LinkedIn. But I'll give an example, okay. Like for, let's say Instagram TikTok, like short form. So we see anywhere between $500 for a dedicated sponsored video that obviously appears on the influencers channel, not UGC, that we put on ours. So anywhere between $500 to say $4,000. So let's say I have this range that I've, you know, and that's a big range. Okay, but if we are, you know, and generally speaking, like, if I were to do a list of all the influencers that we've ever worked with on a, on the B2B front, which is probably in the hundreds, you know, the range in terms of following it could be anywhere between two kids to say a million. However, it's really the views that matter the most. So what I'm trying to say is over time you create your own benchmark, your own ranges and your own way to like. The way we do it at least is we calculate. You know, let's say I'm looking at an influencer's profile. I have their data, they've sent me their pricing. So I break it down to the cost per view. So I look at their average views today and you know, the pricing that they sent me and I calculate the cost per view and that's how I can compare between influencers of different sizes. And also that too, like, I'll have a benchmark after a few good campaigns, I have a benchmark. So if it's below or if it's equal to, then I don't negotiate. However, if it's way above, you know, I will. But negotiation with influencers, I always say to my team, like, you need to be careful because these aren't just, this isn't a conference you want to sponsor or like some supplier for swag, you know, like, these are influencers and they have, they're connected to other influencers that you're probably, you know, if you're in the same niche, especially B2B, and it's quite small, they talk to each other. And you need to be very delicate because you don't want to burn bridges. You don't want them talking badly about you in their communities. I mean, yeah, you don't want to just pay everyone whatever it is they ask for because that's stupid. But it's okay to say to someone, listen, like, we love your content, we respect that. That's your pricing. It's above our budget for now. I'm going to keep you in mind for future campaign where I have a bigger budget, you know, so I don't, I don't try. This isn't like an ego trip. Like this is, you know, you have a budget for a campaign, there are X amount of influencers that you're reaching out to. They each charge differently. Like every single, like each case, you need to break it down and compare and decide if you want to negotiate or not. And if you do, then can I afford it or not? And you kind of build like a puzzle of this of budget until you complete it. And when you start, because pricing is all over the place, you have no idea how it's going to end. You know, like you think in your head, ah, great, you know, I have 50k, let's say it's LinkedIn. I want to work with 50 influencers. They're going to do one post, it's going to cost a thousand dollars. No, it doesn't work like that because you start reaching out to them, they don't all get back to you. This one can't. This one's that they give you their pricing. It's way more than you thought and there's some that are than you thought. So you kind of, you need to just be aware that you can't control everything and you need to just slowly, slowly put the pieces together. And what I say also is, you know, when you evaluate the campaign or you're measuring, you know, the campaign, I always look at the entire campaign and not just to kind of fish out one piece of content or one influencer and make a judgment because it's not all going to perform the same. Each piece of content will perform differently. Some will flop, some will pop. That's just the way it is. And I think at the end you defined what your goals were and KPIs were for that campaign. Wait till it's over, give it, what, 30 days, depending on of course the platform, and then evaluate it as a whole.

Host (20:11)

I think the three things I like about that is one, I do know that it's just like employees too. They talk about salary. Even though you don't want them to talk about salary, they talking about salary. Creators are talking to each other about, hey, this brand charged this or this brand said this. Are they cheap? Are they not? Should I work with them? Do you like the influencer manager there? Do you not like them? Are they mean to work with? Are they easy to work with? All those things happen, happen where a conference is way different. They, they're just trying to get whatever. So that was a great. And also like, I think so many influencers, like some like don't know at all like what the space is. So they probably are underestimating themselves. And then some people think they're bigger than they are and they're overestating. So it's like a weird space where you don't know everything.

Sarah (21:08)

It's very strange.

Host (21:10)

Yeah. What are some ways, like, how are you managing all this in the back end? Is it like a system you use? Like, how do you manage? Like I have, you said you have hundreds and hundreds of creators. Like how do you manage? Like all these creators, are they in a document, are there in a CRM, are they like, what does that look like on the back end?

Sarah (21:31)

So we, when we started off it was of course Google Sheets we did look into. There are so many end to end platforms that are very expensive. I remember we did a series of demos, got extremely confused by them and our conclusion was that it's not good for us. I mean there are many faults. Like for example, to use them in most cases, influencers need to opt in to the platform. And then what do you do if they don't want to opt in? Like what do you not work with them or do you have a parallel workflow for influencers that don't want to opt in and then if they opt out after your campaign's over, you won't see that the performance of their content in that campaign anymore. And then we moved our workflow to Monday.com, which works well because it allows, it gives me at least and the other members of the team a good overview of the pipeline because we have several people working on different campaigns at the same time with different influencers. So that's how we track everything. And we also use, we use a tool called Favicon for discovery for influencer discovery, and we use a tool called Scrapy Monster for monitoring. So those are the three main tools that we use for the workflow.

Host (22:52)

No, I do think like there's some good influencer platforms, but then like you said, the opt in is like really annoying for some creators and some creators. So that, so like, yeah, there's, there's no. I just wanted to see what the, your back end looks like because I think everybody has it. And also like one thing I think I'm really interested in is like you have hundreds but like the best, like influencer managers, I say are really good at like staying personal with creators, I would say. So how, how are you like making sure, like maintain relationships with them?

Sarah (23:28)

Make sure, like it's, it's not easy, but it's like you said, it's, it's very important. When we started off, we insisted on getting on calls with everyone, which is extremely time consuming. But even like a 30 minute call, an intro call changes. So it just sets up the relationship for success, you know, you know when you just talk to someone. And then I remember we reached a stage where we knew we wanted to scale considerably. Like, and we knew that we can't in our existing headcount, there's no way we're getting on calls with everyone. So we moved to like an email first or email only communication, which surprisingly, like, we were sure that creators wouldn't want that, but actually there are many that even say to us, no, email's fine. So, but at least there's still a relationship even if it's over email. But what we do is we kind of try to find a spot in between where if it's a very strategic influencer, if it's someone that maybe we've either very large or someone that maybe we've been trying to work with for a very long time and is suddenly interested, you know, so. Or maybe someone that speaks A lot or is very identified with one of our competitors, although not exclusive, exclusive with them. But there is like some sort of hesitation there. Then we get on a call and of course if there's a situation along the way where we sense that there's, there isn't alignment or maybe they submitted a video that's so off brief and it's just not good enough to like to respond via email is just going to be, just going to lead to more miscommunication and understanding. So we get on a call. So we try to find a solution in between what we don't like. There was a period of time where we did try to, we did use a couple of agencies and we did end up feeling quite frustrated that we didn't own the conversation and the relationship that everything had to go through a third party through the agency. So we believe like our conclusion is that as time consuming as it may be, it's so valuable and it's really the reason why we love what we do is because of that relationship.

Host (25:52)

I know you said at the beginning, like the number one thing you ask before you do a campaign or anybody should ask before is like what is the goal? Right? And I know you've gave some metrics like views, so I'm guessing like after these campaigns done, you use those tools to like scrape and say, okay, here are all the views, here's the cost, here's the cost per view, per creator. This is how it perform. Is there any other criteria? Like I know some creators that like 10,000 followers but they're like all in your niche. And then there's some periods that have 10,000 followers and maybe 10% are in the niche. Like how do you balance those type of things? Because obviously it's awareness. Are you going only on views? But is there quality of views versus like not quality of views you look at as well?

Sarah (26:47)

So I think anyone in this industry needs to, to understand that you'll never really be able to say who those views are exactly. Especially you know, today when you're browsing through, you know, you're scrolling on TikTok on Instagram, you're getting content that's being recommended to you, not necessarily following those people, but you're being recommended, it's being recommended to you by the algorithm. So I think you just need to. Because if you're like data obsessed, then you probably won't sleep at night working with influencers. You do kind of need to understand that at some point you need to, to, to let, to let go in a way but the way we deal with that, with that understanding is investing a lot in the influencer discovery process and to really choose them wisely. So for example, I would rather work with an influencer who is. If it's a web designer and they have an Instagram channel and they do reels about many different things and not just web design, then I would prefer to work with one that only creates content about web design. Like one after the other, that's all they do, that's that focus. So it's. So we believe in investing a lot in the selection process to prevent those things from happening. Now another option is to invest in paid so to, to boost to promote those videos and then you do have control over targeting and you have way more data. So I guess again it depends on the goals and what you're trying to achieve with that campaign.

Host (28:35)

You know, you give examples of like the channels you're working on. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. Let's say like LinkedIn was banned today because it's the number one B2B channel. I would say like what would be like your the next platform you're going to like double down on the most if LinkedIn was banned.

Sarah (28:58)

Yeah, the answer to that would vary depending again on who the target audience is and where do they kind of hang out. I mean there is no other social platform like LinkedIn. I mean in some cases, like for example for the web development site space, Niche X is really powerful. But then for like web design, Instagram is more powerful for web designers. So it just depends on the, on your target.

Host (29:29)

I have two more questions for you. One of them is like, what is one of like your most spiciest takes about influencer marketing and B2B that like most CMOs probably would disagree.

Sarah (29:43)

So I guess to answer that I could say that I think at least the mistakes that I see one of them. And it goes back to our discussion about creative freedom, et cetera. I know of companies of teams that give the influencers scripts, they tell them what to say. And that to me is like it hurts me in my body to hear that because that to me is the worst. Like don't, you know, you don't want to feed, you don't want to put words in their mouth, you don't want them to say your tagline, you don't want them to speak like you because that really takes the authenticity away. And I think creator, I hope creators in those situations, you know, are wise enough to say no, no, no, no, like I'm going to, I'M going to tell me what the message is that you want me to deliver, and I will do it in my own words because otherwise it just looks and feels like an ad, which is, which is really defeating the purpose completely. Right. Because you're just crushing the authenticity, which is really why you should be working with influencers. So I'd say that's probably the number one.

Host (30:54)

Yeah. It's so crazy to me because I think the point of doing influencer marketing is like you're trying to tap into an audience that you want to gain trust in and you want to gain authority in and you want to gain views in, because your brand doesn't have necessarily that trust or views or people don't know that your brand that much, or you want more people and you're telling, you're trying to give. Make the, the influencer less trustworthy by giving them a script that won't work for them. So that immediately people are tuning out. So I just think it goes against like, what influencer marketing is in the first place, which is trying to be. You're trying to tap into another person's audience and that's really what influencer.

Sarah (31:39)

Yeah.

Host (31:39)

And gain trust with your brand and more trust with your brand. Lastly, is like, I asked everybody in this podcast this question, but what is a marketing hill you would die on?

Sarah (31:54)

So I think actually what I said before about, about telling the influencer what to do, that's definitely something that I, you know, I feel, and my team as well, that we in a way, like represent the influencer in the organization. So we'll have requests sometimes from brand, from the brand team, or from different PMMs, and we need to be kind of the gatekeepers and to say to them, no, no, no, no, this isn't the way it works, or this won't work, or we need to approach this differently, or no, you can't tell them what to say, or no, they won't read our tagline. That's something that I feel that the influencer marketing manager's job is as well. So it's not just representing the brand in front of the influencer, but it's also kind of advocating for and gatekeeping within the organization with the different teams that you're working with on the campaigns.

Host (32:58)

Yeah, I mean, I would probably die in that hill as well because I think also there's so many things you miss out on if you don't do that. For example, it could change your messaging to an audience because they know how to talk to the audience. So it could change messaging to your audience. It could show like a different angle to approach your audience. It could show like influencers know how to because like they're talking to those people all day. That's their goal. If they're, if they're good. B2B influencer, like the end mind of their, their talk is to be like audience focused.

Sarah (33:37)

Yeah. And we, we often do this, especially if we're launching a new product or feature where we just, we don't even give a brief where we say, hey, we've launched this new product or feature, whatever it is, you know, play around with it and you tell us which angle you want to take. And that's always very interesting. Like if you do that with say 20 influencers, right, and you're telling them the same thing, it's very interesting to see how they interpret that, what they choose to focus on, what are the values of the product that they like they the most. Very interesting exercise.

Host (34:19)

Lastly, question I have for you is like, where could people find you follow you follow what you're doing.

Sarah (34:26)

So definitely LinkedIn, that's where I am. It's the only social media platform I'm on, if I'm honest and my email is visible. So if anyone ever wants to reach out to me, ask a question, feedback, whatever, go ahead.

Host (34:45)

Cool. Thank you so much. I appreciate you coming on.

Sarah (34:49)

Thanks. It was interesting.

Daniel Murray (34:53)

Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.