(13) An Introduction to B2B Influencer Marketing w/ Limelight’s CEO David Walsh - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAQ_zqInFJ0

Transcript: (00:00) Now is the time to create content. The time was yesterday actually 2020 2012 Instagram nobody promoted products. Okay. And then almost overnight everyone promoted products. That's where we're at with LinkedIn influencer marketing today. (00:19) The truth is every marketing leader that I meet with is frustrated with diminishing return on investment that they're getting from digital ads. How should I evaluate whether it was a success or not? All right. Before we dive in, you're listening to the executive brand podcast with me, your host, Finn Thormayer. Each week, I sit down with top B2B CEOs, executive, and founders to break down their playbooks. (00:40) If you've not yet, it would really help if you subscribe or follow the show because it helps us get on better guests and create better content for you guys. All right, let's dive in. I'm here with David Walsh, the founder and CEO at Limelight. Limelight is a B2B creator marketplace. (00:59) So it basically connects brands with B2B influencers to run influencer marketing campaigns used by companies like Clay, Web Flow, and HubSpot. Started the company in 2023. Before that, he was CEO and co-founder at Madison, which was a workforce analytics platform that was acquired by Change Force AI. And before that, founder of Chase West USA, which is a DTOC ecom watch brand that he also sold, uh, where you work with influencers. So, it's kind of a little bit of a full circle there. (01:26) Um, thanks for coming on the show and anything to correct or amend there in that intro? No, thanks for having me, Finn. Excited for the conversation. Cool. The reason why I wanted to have you on is because on this podcast, I talk all the time with people about LinkedIn, founder brand, executive thought, leadership, employee advocacy, but I want to learn more also about the kind of B2B influencer marketing space. (01:52) and uh felt like a great you felt like a great guest to have on. So maybe as a very first question, when do you think a company should do influencer marketing? What's the right stage time to do it? Yeah, actually that's a really great place to start. Um I would say we have said yes to many companies because we have a productled strategy and we have a pure play marketplace. (02:16) So we just let anyone sign up and try influencer marketing. That's not the right approach. You have to have a product that people love. You have to have a brand that is somewhat known. It doesn't have to be, you know, it doesn't have to be well well known, but you have to have a product that people love and you have to product market fit. (02:34) So, we have typically after series A and onwards is like a good starting off point. Um, but it really comes back to do you have a product that people love that solves a specific problem and that there is an audience of people who share content about solving that specific problem. (02:52) And if you have that, then we feel like there's a big enough market opportunity to use creators and influencers. Um, I do think that we work with early stage startups and it can be very successful. Um, but you have to spend a certain amount of budget for this to make sense. You can't just assume let's just get three creators to create three LinkedIn posts and it's going to drive 100k in new revenue. That's not realistic. (03:11) So you have to be willing to commit to it for 3 months minimum. And you have to be willing to commit enough budget that the way I look at it, Finn, that you have enough surface area, right? Like enough experiments to run. Um if you kind of dip your toe in and don't fully commit to it, well, you're going to have a bad experience. (03:29) And so our job is to set some expectations. And that's a long-winded answer to your question. It's usually product market fit companies who have enough budget who are willing to commit to three months. Do you find there is a certain ACV that it works better at? Interesting question. Um, we have worked with companies anywhere from 10K ACV up to 150k ACV. (03:54) So, it actually is pretty broad. Now, productled strategies are a little easier to track. uh the conversion's a little like cleaner and it's a little shorter of a sales cycle, but that shouldn't stop you from um working with influencers. Like we work with cyber security companies, big financial institution companies, like they have long sales cycles and huge contract values and often they have a brand budget um that they're willing to spend on this and um yeah, I don't think the ACV really matters uh as long as you're collecting enough data to support that it's a good investment. Do you given that you're kind of in the (04:31) B2B creator space are most of the brands and influencers you connect is it LinkedIn people on LinkedIn and if so is it like 80% and then some newsletter or give me an idea of what's the split here. Yeah. And so by way of introduction we've built an influencer marketplace for B2B. (04:57) We have exposed available ad space from that's never existed before and we've done it across all social channels. We started with LinkedIn because nobody had done it. We did started with there two years ago and we said this feels like the the most interesting space and also the most challenging. Um so we said let's go after that first. (05:14) Um and then we've expanded into newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, Twitter, even some Instagram and Tik Tok. but Finn all very focused on business content um and subject matter experts. So I would say bread and butter is LinkedIn and then it's YouTube, Twitter, uh newsletters kind of fast follow. Yeah. (05:38) Why did you say LinkedIn is the most challenging? Well, if you go to LinkedIn, you try to look for creators, it's impossible. They don't have any search for follower count. Follower count is meaningless on LinkedIn for the most part because of the historic nature of it. Over a decade ago, people were using follower count. They were just connected with as many people as they can. That doesn't indicate that they're a creator. (05:56) And for LinkedIn, it's very hard to find people who actually create content, you know, and that get good engagement. You can probably find people that create content, but it's also hard to get find people with good engagement. Um, so LinkedIn from a search perspective was the most challenging to find. In fact, nobody had it when we started. (06:15) Nobody had access to a network or a database of creators or influencers on LinkedIn. So, we went out and looked at 30,000 LinkedIn profiles. Took us 3 months to do and we scored, ranked, tagged every creator and found the top three and a half to 4,000 creators that we felt were really strong. Um, and that's how we started. (06:33) So, that's just from the search part side of things. There's probably other challenges with LinkedIn that I could get into, but just from a search perspective, that was the most difficult thing to do. Is it I assume that do all the influencers you match brands with people who just sign up at your platform or do you actually reach out to them and they've never done a deal. (06:56) They never signed up at Limelight and you help reach out to them and say, "Hey, ever consider doing this? How about you try it?" Yeah, I'll give you the inside scoop. When you start a marketplace, and I've built two in the past, are extremely challenging, right? You got the cold start problem, you've got supply and demand issues. You've got to get them enough marketplace liquidity. (07:13) So, we started with the creator side and said, let's go get as many good quality creators that we know are high high engagement and let's create a searchable interface for them and let's see if brands will pay us for that and get access to that. So, I'd say at the very beginning, we were reaching out to creators, but it was with real intent. Like, it was here is a proposal from a brand that is willing to pay you a certain amount of money. (07:33) It wasn't spamming, you know, a ton of or a thousand creators. It was saying here's an actual offer. Are you interested? And if they said they were interested, then we onboarded them. So, that's how we started. I would say 90% of all our deals at the beginning was that channel. Now, we were also meeting with creators. I was doing outbound to them. (07:52) I was trying to get as many onboarded as possible so they would create their own accounts. Um, but our driving force of what made us take off was actually huge name brands that we work with like HubSpot, Web Flow, Zoom Info, Bill.com, all wanting to work with creators on our database and sending them messages um with real dollar amounts and that would entice them to click accept and be interested. (08:16) So to answer your question, at the beginning it was a little bit of that kind of growth hack mindset. Now we have thousands of creators. So we have a much more supply and most of the creators are already on the database for for creators doing it for the first time assuming they are either an employee executive somewhere right the and it's going to be out going out on their personal LinkedIn profile let's say how do you help them navigate maybe how to have the conversation with their employer? That's a great question. (08:45) Um so there's two types of creators in my mind. There's creators and that are full-time creators. They do this for a living. They sell a product, they sell a service, they sell a coaching course, whatever it might be, but they are solo entrepreneurs or small business owners. Then there is the creator which is 50% who already have a job and have built an audience. (09:09) And in those regards or in those situations, they often need to get approval if it's a large enough company from the brand or from their employer to post about a product. Um, or they kind of already have policies in place. So, I'd say 50% of the time it's creators who, you know, are are are creators full-time and 50% they have a W2 in the US and they're just doing this on the side. They just in that regard, you don't want to be promoting a product that's any way competitive. (09:31) So, um, and then you asked about like first- time doing this. For most creators, it's first time. You know, I got asked from investors when we were raising capital recently like why now? Why why now? And if you think about it, like 2020 2012, Instagram people, nobody promoted products, okay? And then almost overnight, everyone promoted products. (09:50) That's where we're at with LinkedIn influencer marketing today. So, it's not only that um it's there's more available ad space because more creators are creating content than ever before. So, brands can access these channels and the niche audiences are also really powerful. It's creators are becoming more normalized to this. (10:10) When I first started two years ago and I was reaching out to some of the biggest creators on LinkedIn, they were like, "We don't do brand partnerships. It'll diminish our brand. We're not interested." Well, guess what? Now, I would say 90% of them have been paid to our product and platform because it's become more normalized. It's more accepted and it doesn't ding their professional brand. (10:27) It actually elevates it. Hey, I'm part of Zoom Info's creator program. That makes you kind of a creator to look after. That's or to look up to. It's aspirational. So, I think that shift has happened pretty quickly, meaning more available ad space, more creators, creators willing to do more brand partnerships. (10:46) The key there though, Finn, is it has to be authentic. You do not want to be promoting a product that you are never used in your life before and they're just saying, "Post this tomorrow about us." Like, that's not realistic. So, authenticity is critical. (11:04) Um, and then through AI and measurement capabilities and enrichment, we're now getting it to be much more measurable, which becomes very exciting for brands who are reallocating ad spend to some of these paid marketing channels and using creators instead. So, those are kind of the three driving motivators or kind of things that are happening in the market that are exponentially growing this uh industry. (11:23) I want to definitely get to the measurement stuff and how companies should do this. One more question from the creator side of things. What's your what's your recommendation on how many let's say a creator is able to attract brands. How many posts should be sponsored? Because I have one person who comes to mind where I just feel like every second post I see from them is some brand partnership. (11:49) And I don't mind brand partnership. I think it's cool. You should do you if you like the brand and all that, but every second one feels way too much. Yeah, I agree. And look, it's a taste. Um, there are some creators who will post once a day about a brand partnership because they post three times a day. (12:06) There's some creators that will say, "I'm not doing more than one post a month." So, it's a very um creator dependent on what they think is the right fit. In the end of the day, if the product, if the post is authentic, if the problem is real, and if your audience care about it, and you're able to create a good piece of content about it, it shouldn't feel like a brand sponsorship or brand partnership. (12:30) The worst scenarios is a brand comes and says, "This is what I want you to say to the creators." And they're like, "What are you talking about? That doesn't sound like me. It's just going to fall flat." like it has to be uh in the voice of the creators and feel authentic and be some sort of a story that is a real story. Uh and that's that what what works the best. (12:49) So frequency short answer is frequency of the creator depends on the creator. I think authenticity matters and if it's authentic you can do more of them. Um I don't I think six months ago as su as as recently as six months ago right definitely 18 months ago people used to kind of uh diminish your personal brand for doing a brand partnership and now that's the reverse. So you're seeing people do it more frequently and more often. (13:15) And I would also say another thing Finn is that organic content is just a first step. I want to work with these creators. I want them to create content. Here's a story about them solving a problem. Maybe you do a handful of posts with them over a period of three months and you kind of test and iterate and improve, right? Those best performing pieces of content are becoming paid ads. Meaning, you're doing thought leadership posts. (13:38) You're saying, "Okay, we're going to take this piece of content that performed really well organically and we're going to retarget our audience based off our website traffic, our LinkedIn audience types, and all of the different data that we have to get very specific on our ICP." That's very different because then the post shows up without it needing to go through the social channel of the creator every time. (13:58) Um, so the restraint really is available ad space for the creator. Each creator doesn't want to create too much content, but one piece of content can be reused and that's what we see perform really well. Now, we talked about who should do this product market fit series A plus um want to do it for at least 3 months. (14:18) What is the right way to approach it? Like if you could get a brand and you consult them, let's say they're a series C startup. Um how many creators to pick? Who to pick? By which criteria for long, how long to do it, how many posts are we going to do? How else to amplify it? Like what's the perfect campaign in your mind to execute this? So at the very beginning um I think about once a brand tells us a budget and sometimes they're reluctant to do that because it's sales right they're like I don't want to tell you a budget you'll just tell me let's go maximize that or (14:51) it's not enough right that's not the way you should think about it the budget decides the strategy it decides how wide you can go how many creators how high you can go if you want to go after the bigger creators who are more expensive or how deep you want to go meaning multi- channelannel partnerships uh maybe LinkedIn newsletter and a podcast or an event that they might come to. So, you've got to decide once you've decided on the budget, what's the strategy? What are we trying to accomplish? Are do we (15:17) want to work with the top 1% creators who get more reach and more exposure and bring more brand uh validation to us or do we want to be everywhere all at once where we might work with a lot of niche creators? I always recommend dipping your toe into this. (15:37) the best return on investment you're going to get is to go wide at the beginning because you need more surface area and you need more um experimentation. So go wide, try work with as many creators as you can. And maybe just to backtrack a little bit in influencer marketing and B2C, everyone knows B2C influencer marketing, right? Instagram um you know the top 1% of people make the money. You have a million followers. Um you know on Instagram you take a picture on a beach wearing sunglasses. (16:03) uh it's and then a conversion rate of 0.5% happens and the company's then happy right they've sold you know hundreds or if not thousands of um sunglasses in B2B you're influencing the product could be 25K 50k 100k maybe even a couple hundredk in lifetime value right so what that means in reality is the smaller niche creators are extremely valuable often the top 1% are already bought and sold for like you just said Finn you think of one person who posts content and gets paid every single day. (16:34) Well, guess what? That's saturation. So, the brand maybe doesn't want to, you know, be part of that content um from that creator because they're posting about so many things all at once, it's just hard to cut through the noise, right? The best quality campaigns we've seen have been small creators. (16:58) And I'm talking on LinkedIn specifically, let's say 15,000 followers to 30 or 40,000 followers. Get 20 of them creating content consistently um about solving problems using your product. And there's two ways to think about that, Finn, or two strategies that we've seen. We've seen the 11 Xs of the world take over news feeds and just say, "Let's go a million miles an hour. (17:15) let's do a fund raise or a product launch and let's get 50 creators posting about us and we don't care how much it costs and by the way it's driven a thousand demos for them and like exponentially grew their their air or their pipeline. Then the more strategic approach in my opinion the better approach is to get creators to create content every single day. Get 20 creators and rotate them. (17:40) on a Monday this creator posts. On a Tuesday this creator posts. Um, and if you get 20 of them, well, there's 20 working days in the month. You can rotate them and one creator posts one time a month. Doing that is the most powerful because it compounds and it keeps you at the top of the news feeds and also you can track some of the metrics better because you know what creator posted on what day. So you can track website traffic and signups and other things. (18:04) So long-winded answer to your question. Hopefully that makes sense. Can you give me a rough idea? Let's say we do that. We pick 20 creators who each have in that 15 to 30,000 follower range. So, good amount, but not the massive creators. And let's say we if we have 20 working days, we want each of them put to post three times in total, which does which is 60 posts, which is one post a day for 3 months. (18:32) Can you give me a very rough range of what that would cost? Obviously, it depends on who exactly and what audience and all of that, but are we talking 10,000, 100,000? I mean, the way I would look at it, if you're going after small creators, you asked me to do maths on the fly here now, so I'm going to pull up my calculator, but I I'll say like 60 posts, you're talking between $500 and $1,000. (18:58) When you think about creators that are between 15,000 followers and let's say 30,000 followers, you know, that's usually the range to 60,000 total. Mhm. Correct. Okay. And then, okay, let's say we do that for three months. We spend 30,000, 60,000, maybe a little more than that. How should I be thinking about measuring impact? Do I correlate? Do I measure self-reported attribution and hope that from those posts, someone books a demo and tells me specifically that? How should I evaluate whether it was a success or not? Honestly, such a great question, Finn. And it starts, we work with two types of users. One is usually the head of brand, (19:40) the head of social. The budget is coming from the brand budget. They're spending it on billboards and TV adverts, and now they're saying, "Let's go spend it on creators in a digital format." Awesome. They care less about the conversion and tracking. Um, we don't believe that that's what what the end goal of this is. (20:00) My ultimate goal of B2B influencer marketing is to make it performance-based. Yes, it's about brand awareness, but we need to track revenue where possible. It is a messy process. We start with analyzing where what is the current revenue attribution process for uh the business today. Do you have self-reported uh se demo signups? Do you have a productled strategy or salesled strategy? How are you tagging certain leads in the pipeline etc. (20:25) Once we understand that and we grasp all of that, then we say, "Okay, if you're a salesled product with a longer sales cycle, we need to make sure that you've got self-reported revenue attribution um in the signups of your demo, we need to track the website traffic each time a creator posts and attribute some sort of like ratio of that to the creators. Usually, you'll see a spike. (20:50) And it's then important to take total demos that day and conversion, you know, divide it by a percentage. Um, so just the the standard revenue attribution stuff is is kind of par for the course. We need to have that in place to begin with. The the next evolution of this, the one the thing that is kind of most interesting is we need to be tracking who's engaging on the content. (21:13) you know, who are the people engaging on the content, what is their job title, what size of company are they at, what is their kind of who is their who's the employer, and get a bit more granular on can we see people engaging on this content at scale that are actually our ICP and can we use those engagers to create some sort of marketing qualified lead over time or add them to a nurturing sequence. (21:38) So, when you exponentially grow your content reach on social channels, there's a few different kind of knock-on effects. The first one is the whole company gets very excited. Every single company we work with, the executive team are like, "We love this. Oh my god, people are talking about us." The board of directors, the new investors, they're like, "This is insane. (21:55) Like, we just invested and now everyone's talking about this product, right? You want that." Um, the next thing is the creators create great content. So they tell stories about solving problems and usually they're pretty good at identifying what the good value propositions are. (22:10) So there's this like marketing educational component that happens that a lot of people overlook. When you see creators creating content, they actually repurpose or reuse some of the way in which they're telling that story for their own marketing channels, right? Then there's the, you know, get them to post content, let's track the conversions, let's track the revenue. (22:28) And often it's pretty I wouldn't say 100% clear, but it's it's easy to do once you've got enough data. You can say, "Okay, well, we had 60 posts go out. We track the website traffic. We track the conversions." And usually you'll see an uptick of um I would say like socially driven demo signups. (22:48) Um and you can even get more specific if you want, like drop in the creator's name if you're working with 20 creators and they can self- select who that is. Um, but then the next thing is obviously once you got 60 posts, you probably have thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of people engaging on that content. Now, truthfully, Finn, like put my hands up and say like 80% of that is garbage. It's rubbish, right? They're not really people that are good fit, but 20% definitely are. (23:10) And so surfacing them and identifying them and deciding what to do with those leads because it's not a marketing qualified, it's not a salesqualified lead. It's really just a social engagement. So, you don't want to be harassing people, but there's things you can do that are intelligent um that create more longtail revenue attribution and revenue opportunities from that content. (23:30) And then very last one, because I've given you a lot there is the things that we see perform well are also lead magnets. So, a resource that is valuable to the audience, get the creators to create content and offer the lead source. Um, and it can be gated. You know, most of it's gated. People don't love gated content, but it works. (23:50) If it's a quality piece of content that they've put time into, then why not um you know, gate that and then collect email addresses and then add that to your your lead source. Um so again, the reason I tell you all of that like it's a lot obviously is that you need to do 3 months of this. (24:08) Once you've done three months of this, you can then start to realize the the value of this. And by the way, it compounds, you know, it doesn't, you know, once you start to do this more frequently, it gets better and better and better. And obviously that is what you didn't even talk about there is the thought leader ads part where when I think about it if you pay a creator $5002,000 for a post you obviously get the organic distribution the impressions that they're going to get on that post given that they have an audience and the kind of trust and credibility that hopefully they'll be able to lend to your brand too because they're have a good (24:45) reputation. You also get a creative like you get a video or text post that they wrote that they created for you that you could then further use in your own advertising by uh using thought leader ads for example which obviously then you put more budget behind it but you have a creative that's probably I mean user generated content is is a good idea for BTOC brands and so it's kind of that idea for B2B in some sense. I'm going to give you two follow-ups. So, I agree with you 100%. Repurposing that into (25:17) paid ads is even more trackable. It's more measurable. You actually just plug and play goes directly into your LinkedIn uh ad count and then you can track revenue all the way through. It's it's awesome. Um the other one that we see regularly, in fact, it just popped up in my inbox right before we jumped on to record this conversation. It's events. Virtual events. (25:37) You know, huge enterprises run virtual events and they're always trying to boost attendees. And so one way to do that is to get your creators to promote that event and even join the event. Do a kind of a a segment of the event and those are very measurable because you can see who's signing up and see who's um who's joined the event. (25:58) So that's super high return on investment uh measurable ways to work with creators. Um I'm trying to think if there's another one and it just skip my head that I wanted to share with you. It'll come back to me. It will come back. I'm curious. Do you have any opinion on how much budget companies should allocate to this? Let's say we have a $10 million yearly marketing budget, right? And we're spending it on all the usual things, events and Google ads and LinkedIn ads and um do you have a rough recommendation how much of that 10 million we should be putting towards creators? (26:35) It's a great question. Um, the truth is every marketing leader that I meet with is frustrated with the diminishing return on investment that they're getting from digital ads. It's the number one driver. They're like, "This is getting harder and it's getting more expensive and we need a new channel. (26:55) " So, I would say when you start off with, make sure that you have enough budget. 10K minimum per month is usually a good starting off point. get enough creators creating content and then grow it over time once we've collected enough data to prove that this is working. We have companies that have started at 10K and are now at 150k a month, right, in spend monthly. (27:14) So, that's usually it. I I I haven't really cracked the code on like what's the percentage of total digital marketing spend that you should spend on creators yet because every company is different and it's very unique and it's very complicated and they have many different channels. (27:32) I can say Finn that I personally believe every B2B company will have a personallyled marketing strategy. Meaning they're going to have their executives creating content. They're going to have employee advocacy. So they're all of their employees creating more content. They're going to have influencer content, creator content, user generated content. (27:48) Essentially, Finn, the B2B world is and the way in which people are learning about products has changed exponentially. Meaning people are now learning about product in news feeds, on newsletters, in podcasts like this, and they're learning and absorbing information. They're learning about different problems and then solutions to those problems. (28:05) Because of that, marketing leaders need to go more upstream. They need to get into these new news feeds, these new channels, and they need to be experimenting with how do we get our brand recognized um before, you know, before they even come to the sales team or they they land on your website. (28:23) So because of that all B2B companies are going to have marketing that personalityled marketing. We want to be the technology that powers all of that. Um and we believe that there's a huge market opportunity. If you ask me about penetration today because I was talking about this with an investor last week. I think 3% penetration today is probably accurate. (28:41) 3% of B2B companies that could be doing influencer marketing are doing it today. I believe that that's going to exponentially grow over the coming years and it's going to get up to 10 20 maybe even 30% going to creators and influencers and more just like uh personality that marketing strategies will become a huge percentage of the budget and the reason I believe that is number one user behavior users want to learn more about this they want to see people they want to see names they don't want to see corporation and logos but actually it's more of a (29:11) driving forces from the community themselves. Creators are creating content. They're talking about products. The number one we way way we grow today, Finn, is a brand comes to us and says, "I saw my competitors doing this. Why aren't we doing this? We need to sign up immediately. (29:31) " So, every single piece of content that is influencer content is an advert for Limelight. Even if it didn't happen through our platform, people are learning about this and realizing their competitors are doing it and then realizing they need to stand something up. And they either work with agencies, which are great by the way. We have a ton of them that use our product. We we refer brands to agencies. Sometimes they're expensive. They're full service. (29:51) We want them to be a user of our product and use our product and technology to better serve the clients or they work directly with us where we're 20 times cheaper and they can do it uh a lot of the work for themselves or with our new agents that we're launching in the coming weeks. (30:12) What are the most reliable predictors for let's say for a creator? Reliable predictors of a successful corporation. So I'm thinking obviously total follower count is what everyone looks at, but that's probably not necessarily the most important thing to look at. So what what are the most important things that brands should be looking at to pick the right influencers? You hit the nail on the head. Everyone looks at follower count. (30:37) I say disregard it completely. Follower count does not mean anything on LinkedIn. Um it the best predictor is actually fit. It's match. It's does the creator create content about this problem set? Do they know it deeply? And is your product well positioned to be the solution? So that's number one. Good fit product. (31:01) I would call it like creator uh I don't even know if I could should coin this. I'll figure it out next time. But creator market fit, creator product fit. There you go. There you go. Creator market fit. I'm going to add that to our website. Yeah, it's creator market fit is number one, right? Is is it a good match? Um and our system has got way better at matching creators. (31:18) We read their content. We read the campaigns. We understand the data and what they're looking for. And that matching piece is critical. The second piece is can they create good content? Is the content engaging? Is it educational? Is it humorous? Is it tactical? Is it strategic? Is it uh inspirational? Like there's all these different types of content and strategy. (31:43) And I think number one is if you're top of funnel and you want to do like a v ver virality, you create some level of like universal problem and then you prod that and then you create a resource that people can download and it's very sort of spammy in my mind. (32:01) I think the better approach is middle of funnel, bottom of funnel content with the creators who they talk about a problem and a solution and it's very authentic and um I think quality of content is probably the second most important driving factor. And then obviously consistency don't just dip your toe in and say this creator didn't drive any leads this day. That doesn't make any sense you know get them to do it consistently. (32:20) So often Finn, we see a company do three posts let's say with a creator. The first is kind of introducing the problem, talking about it at a high level, not getting really tactical. The next is getting more tactical and talking a little bit more about the product. And then the third is kind of a reiteration of that. (32:37) Um, so there's this kind of introduction to the brand partnership through the creator's content versus a hard sell up front. Do you I don't know if you can share this, but do you have a specific example of one LinkedIn post can be facilitated through limelight or not that you in your head you show brands you're like this is a perfect cooperation this creator this post how they created this with this brand like that's what you want to get to. (33:08) Do you have any such specific example in mind? What usually happens in our sales cycle is the company might ask for examples in which we give them an Excel spreadsheet with every type of content and every type of creator and exact examples of like here's a bottom offunnel you know strategic or tactical piece of content that's a video. So we usually give them like a quick summary. (33:31) Um we're hesitant to share it publicly because sometimes we can't under NDA and like it's up to the creator and the brand. Um sure I often just point to other brands. Uh like Clay was our first customer. You know, we started working with Clay. We hand built a product alongside them at the very beginning. (33:50) If you see content about Clay on LinkedIn, there's a strong percentage chance it's paid through our product. They are awesome at doing this. OED, who's the head of influencer there, is phenomenal at thinking about this from a very creative lens um and keeping the brand top of mind. (34:10) So, they have a very sophisticated, way ahead of the curve influencer program that everyone's trying to replicate. We power it. We pay all the creators. Um, we track some of their content for them. Um, they're the ones to look up to and the ones that have been doing this the longest that are the most informed because they've got OED and the team and a really great product for creators, of course. (34:28) Um, so yeah, that's how it works. What are some of the things that stick out to you that Clay is doing differently that that others are not? It's a multi-tered approach instead of, you know, they've got the creators. So, they actually, let's start with what they started with. (34:47) They started with people using their product, very specific experts of their product, doing demonstrations about solving a problem, very bottom of funnel, very expertled, not about reach. Then they kind of layered in, okay, let's get the biggest creators, the most well-known creators. let's go build clay tables for them. Um that solves a problem for them as a user and let's get them just talking about it and showing what happened over the four weeks that they've been using this clay table for themselves. (35:12) Um, and then they've got educational content or what I would say like humorous content that's just very compelling and exciting and it it kind of turns B2B marketing on its head where it used to be just corporations and smacking you with logos over the face that just feel like very crap essentially and not personality or friendly. (35:33) Um, they decided to go the opposite and now they're leading the charge with that. some of their productions and their videos. I'm like, "Oh my god, this is better than like a TV advert or a movie set. Um, and they invest a ton of money into that and I think it works." You know, they've exponentially grown. Um, and it's not just because of their product. It's actually because of the distribution. (35:52) Um, there's plenty of companies that are replicating their product or trying to replicate it. Well, they can't replicate the brand. They can't replicate the distribution. In fact, going all the way back, Finn, when I first started Limelight, I went deep into what do I want to do for the next 10 years? I said, marketing is my expertise. I have a masters in marketing. I love branding. I love, you know, building products. (36:11) I want to sell to marketing leaders and the new evolution of marketing is going to be personalityled and we need a product that can solve that and bring that to life and make it easier and more convenient. Influencer marketing is super messy. (36:29) you know, you're dealing with individuals, content calendars, scheduling, payments, egos a lot of the time, right? So, we try to streamline all of that and make this a channel that you can grow. And so, final thought is like companies spend a fortune on acquiring customers through paid ads. It's getting more expensive and they're willing to spend a ton of money. The reason that they haven't spent on influencers is because influencers didn't exist and it was really inefficient. (36:54) there was very like huge friction points to scale from five creators in an Excel spreadsheet to 200 creators. So you need a system of record. You need a way to scale this. Um that's what we're focused on and also the measurable measurability of this. Um so super fun place to be. (37:14) What how what have you seen on what's the right way between a creator and a brand to decide on the creative because I assume both sides of the extreme where either the brand just says you need to post this that doesn't work but also just giving them complete freedom and just you know you post whatever you want you know whatever you like what's the right amount of guard rails and guidelines to give while letting the creator have their own voice. Yeah. So for context, we work with publicly traded companies like Bill. (37:44) com and Zero who are financeoriented and are very very conservative in many ways. They are changing. I speak with the team there and they are super excited about how much more flexibility they're they're they're offering. And then I work with like the early stage startups who are obviously just like let's just you just do what whatever you want. (38:03) Um the truth is is there's lots of wasted energy and time in dealing with each creator one-on-one. You know what we realized and we've been tracking this for two years now is dealing with each creator oneonone is actually a big time suck. So what we do is we allow the brand to create a document that will include the campaign goals, the key value proposition, the target audience, the key messaging, um even some content guidelines and examples. You do not want to tell the creator what to write. you want to give them enough information (38:34) that allows them to use their creative brain to write in their own voice. Um, and so we put together these documents um that we send to the creators at scale and then they create the content and come back and send it to the brand for approval. I would say nine times out of 10 there's no edits done, there's no red lines. (38:57) The brands are usually very excited and happy with the content because you got to remember the people we're working with have been content creators for 12 months to five years. So, they've been creating this content for a long time. When you give them enough information, they're great writers. You know, they're great content creators. Um, even the video content that we've done has been incredible. (39:16) So, often the brands are pretty excited about the quality of the content. I think it's very different in BTOC. I think in B TOC you've got a different caliber of um creators who have grown huge audiences but maybe kind of haven't they you know they could create any piece of content and you need to be a bit more hands-on with them. (39:39) With B2B what we found is nine times out of 10 there's no red lines, no edits done and it just comes back to Finn, let the creators have the creative freedom. If you don't do that you're going to fail from the outset. In fact, we're starting to add a mandate like if you start to tell the creators what to do and how what content to write, we don't even want to work with you, you know? So, because it just doesn't work. It just falls flat. (40:03) And often, like if you think about this, like some of our creators getting paid $8,000 a post. Okay. 8,000. 8,000. How many followers do you need to get paid $8,000? Honestly, I've seen followers with $500,000 get paid a lot less. The person that I'm thinking that got paid 8,000 has about 150,000 followers. So, it's actually much smaller than some of the bigger verality based creators. It's more about the power of their audience and their brand reputation and their name. (40:32) Um, but my point is like don't tell them how to create the content. It falls flat. But if you pay somebody thousands of dollars and then tell them what to write, some of these creators are new to this and they're just like, "Okay, like I'll do it because it's one post. It doesn't really matter, you know, let you just do it. (40:51) " And guess what? Every single time it falls flat, it doesn't get the engagement and people immediately know that this is not written by that creator. So that's not the way to approach this. Creative freedom to the creators is critical. I assume that the the kind of content though that the creator should create should be written in a way where it's natural that you can tag the company, right? So, it shouldn't just be some like skit video that's kind of funny and maybe gets good impressions, but there's no place to naturally mention the product or company. Is that kind of (41:25) always one goal? like we need to be able to in a natural way that it fits within the post and what makes sense to to mention our company and product. I actually disagree. And when I say disagree, I mean that there are brands and companies that we work out there that want to do the humorous skit. They don't even want their logo in the first 60 seconds of a video, for example. (41:51) It's just at the very end and it's like an afterthought. Um, so they're less focused on that. Um, I think it depends on the strategy, depends on what you're trying to drive towards. Yes, I think the content should include a natural tag within the piece of content as like the solution. (42:09) Don't put it in the first 50% of the content, whether it's a video or text. Put it towards the end once you've hooked them in and told a story and got them understanding it. If you try hard sell or upfront try to sell the product, algorithms don't like it and it won't work. How do you think about fatigue? I know that I' I've heard that conversation at least in B TOC where you know influencer will promote uh hair product A on Monday and then pro promote hair product B on uh on Thursday because they got paid by both brands and you know a lot of brands are not going to you know commit to 12 months and 100 posts. They're going to dip their toes (42:51) in for a couple posts and company beer is going to do the same. They're going to dip their toes in and do a couple posts. And so you see creators that are kind of mentioning similar products or even competitive products and and uh obviously it's not good for the creator. It's also not good for the brand. (43:16) Um, are we just so early on the LinkedIn game that companies shouldn't worry about that? Is that going to be a problem in a year or two once like this is going to get more popular? Wolffin, I'd say the first most important probably the most soughtafter piece of our product today that we get asked for regularly is can we check the content of these creators of what they've worked with in the past and have they done brand partnerships in the past? Can we search for competitors and keywords and can we um learn a little (43:47) bit more about historically who they've worked with? I think there's like a time horizon. Usually some of our bigger brands will put in sort of a an exclusive clause for 3 months, let's say. Um I think that's a bit aggressive to be honest. I think you could probably shorten that to six weeks. (44:06) Um but the truth is is like it's not the same as consumer. In consumer, these people will take a quick picture of themselves wearing a piece of sunglasses and then another week to take another picture wearing sunglasses. It's a little bit more transactional. These B2B influencers care about their reputation. They don't want to be promoting tons of different products. (44:24) Um they want to be promoting one product for one niche or one problem and then another product for a different niche, another different problem. So often they're very transparent that they've worked with the competitors. Um, and it's just important to them to stagger them and be authentic about it also like you know Finn very naturally authentically like I try HubSpot I try Salesforce I don't try them together you know I I feel like it's natural to try different products and learn about them and um and speaking authentically about them is fine just make sure that there's enough of a gap in the middle and be super transparent (44:57) with the brand um and let them know I think that's probably the most important piece. Um, so we don't see saturation as being a huge issue right now. Um, a lot of just because creators don't want to do it. They don't want to create, you know, products too consistently. (45:16) Now, again, going back to again, there's there's a percentage of creators that will post anything about everyone. Um, you know, it's that's just the nature of it, right? There's to get paid. So, there's definitely kind of a variance. Um, just do your homework, do your diligence. (45:33) you know, in our product, you can find the creators and their content and see what they've done in the past, and that's super helpful for brands. Now, obviously, you you're quite active on LinkedIn yourself. You're building your own founder brand, which is kind of like you're turning yourself into an influencer, executive thought, leadership, similar idea. (45:54) Do you see these things kind of overlapping or creating synergies in any way? If you're have a strong founder brand, you have your executives posting on LinkedIn and then you're working with with uh with external creators and influencers. Are there synergies or is it just you can do either one? You can do both. It's nice but there are no real synergies let's say. So I'll answer the second part of the question first which is like synergies between content and I'll come back to my personal brand and why I started creating content. So um I believe that every single brand should be pushing (46:23) their employees to create more content. I think it's very natural and it's uh very valuable to the brands. I think there's two schools of thoughts in that. There's the old school thought which is I don't want my employees creating an audience and doing kind of side deals and building this kind of you know business on the side. (46:41) I think that's BS of course and I think it's going away. Um there's the other school of thought which is kind of the more progressive thought which is people should be creating content all the time. I don't care how large of an audience they've get. I I think that's awesome. (46:54) It only helps us as the company because they're associated with us. Um, so to answer your question, employee advocacy has become a huge thing. If you look at LinkedIn and I speak with the leadership team of LinkedIn on a regular basis at this point because they love what we're building and I talk to them a little bit about getting more people to create content because so few people do it on that platform. (47:13) They are seeing a huge surge today in executives creating content on LinkedIn. You know, because those executives are realizing the power of their personal brand even at publicly traded businesses. It used to be that the post would come through the LinkedIn company page. Now it goes through the executive team because it's more personable. (47:32) So I think every company is realizing the power of uh so social essentially and uh employee advocacy and I think they're going to push it to be part of the KPIs and metrics. I think there's a fine line though. You can't push people to be creators who don't want to be creators. (47:50) You can't tell the engineering team, hey engineering team, I want you to create content. Forget about code. AI will write the code. You write the content. Like that's that's not going to work, right? So um you just got to advocate internally for the social advocacy create some sort of like uh team orientated I don't know competition internally about creating more content and doing it more consistently. (48:14) I think the executive team at every company needs to take this really seriously. In fact, Finn, I have this belief that the future most um most exciting job post today that's going to be very soughta is executive content internally at a company. I think there is going to be an enormous amount of people hired to create really great content for the executives and for the creators internally at the team and amplify that. (48:44) So I think that's one thing and then also like to answer the second part or like the another piece of that part of the product or part of the question. It's like there's a huge flywheel that happens. Get creators to create content about your company. Employees create content naturally they engage. It's the reason that I grew my audience so quickly. (49:02) I went from 4,000 followers to now nearly 35,000 followers. Um mostly because I was creating content that creators were engaging on. There's three ways to grow on LinkedIn. Create good content is the most obvious. Second one is engage. Write comments. Get people to write comments. Get them to write comments back to you. (49:20) It helps you change the news feeds and bring you to other news feeds. And the third is the most powerful is get big creators to engage on your content and it elevates the content uh dramatically. So when brands work with us typically we get their employees to create more content. We create more measurability to that content. (49:38) We create kind of a a competition internally or we help them create a competition internally to turn this into a longlasting strategy and not just kind of a turn off turn on turn off. At the same time we get a team of creators 10 20 30 40 50 create content and next thing you know a flywheel happens. They all engage on each other. (49:57) They create this kind of consistency and then the brand becomes everywhere all at once. And then guess what? The board of directors and the executive team, you know, and the the heads of sales are saying, "Hey, where did you hear about us, you know, in the sales process?" "Oh, I saw you on social. I saw you on content. I saw this creator piece of content or I've been following your employees content. (50:16) " It become it goes up through the organization becomes more powerful and more important. And I think that's going to happen at every single company. Final thought on that is like everyone thinks that this is just for a handful of companies and it doesn't work for me or it isn't really a good fit for my niche. That's not true. (50:31) There are in our searchable database 50 to 100 different niches you can search for. I thought there was much smaller pool of creators. Um there's actually a very wide variety because again smaller creators are powerful. People create content about everything. Subject matter experts in every single part of business. We elevate them. we surface them. And don't think that your product can't use creators. It most likely can. (50:56) Um, and then I can come back to why I created content if you're interested too. Yeah. Just one note on that if people want to dive a little bit more into employee advocacy. I just interviewed Olga Andreano who is the XVP brand at Samrush and she built out the employee advocacy program there that generated over 10 million impressions with them per year. (51:22) um also internal scoreboard and all of those fun things to to add incentives. But no, I think it makes a lot of sense and I think there's obviously the the creating great content part which you talked about and then there is the the social interaction part where the more creators you have and then employees who are jumping into the conversation then your executives are creating content. your founder and CEO is active to their commenting and engaging on each other's content. (51:46) It's just it's it's amplifying each other and it's creating this surround sound effect where suddenly I'm seeing a brand all over the place. Um you got to make it measurable for a long time. It's not been measurable, right? If your employees are creating content and you're attributing it to sales pipeline, new leads, new deals coming in, um then it becomes something that they're very excited about. (52:18) So making this content measurable is my belief is the underlying driving motivator for this to be much more effective because people get bored of created content. If I'm working at a big organization as a cog in the wheel and my, you know, CEO and my head of marketing keeps bashing me over the head to create content, I be like, oh, like I don't want to like, okay, I'll do it for the beginning and then I'll just fall off like everyone else, right? If you're saying, hey, you know, now we have a way to track this and we're showing you the revenue that's generated from this. And by the way, if you, you know, if a company comes and (52:49) signs up and says they saw us from one of your employees content, we'll give you a $2,000 bonus. of course you're going to be like, "Oh, cool. All right, this is now becoming more important." So, um I think measurability is um the common denominator between the growth of social and content. (53:14) And I also think, by the way, and I've done the analysis, I've done the research, I've looked at the products, I've looked at the software, social advocacy software sucks. Employee advocacy software just sucks. Uh it's terrible. We're going to make it better and um we're excited about that. There you go. Cool. If one if people want to check out uh both your LinkedIn and Limelight, I'm going to link them in the show notes. (53:38) And uh I appreciate you coming on and shining some light on the uh B2B creator, B2B influencer marketing space. And I I definitely learned a ton. I have a whole whole uh note page full of notes. So appreciate you taking the time. Yeah. Let me just add one thing like anyone listening to this um now is the time to create content. The time was yesterday actually. You know, get started, create the content. I started creating content and never looked back. (54:03) It now drives 90% of all our revenue and all of our business. Um there is so much power in putting yourself out there. It is nerve-wracking. You're going to fail. You're going to look like an idiot sometimes. Your granny's going to tell you, "What the hell are you doing online?" You're going to say, "Don't worry." Uh she's not on LinkedIn. Don't worry. (54:21) Well, my she's she's on LinkedIn and and some of my content and she she my dad shows it to her and it's like, "Oh, yeah. What the hell is this?" So, they don't really understand it yet, but the point of all of that is like, "Yeah, create content. Put yourself out there and get started and do it consistently and you'll see the value." There we go. All right. (54:37) This podcast is brought to you by Project 33. Project 33 is the leading executive thought leadership agency for LinkedIn. If you're looking to activate your founder, your CEO, your executives, or any of your internal subject matter experts and create thought leadership content for them to build trust and credibility for your brand, reach out at project33.io.