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What B2B Influencers Get Paid and Why

Posted Under: Social Pros Podcast
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10XMarketing

Daniel Lemin

Convince & Convert
10XMarketing

Hannah Tooker

LaneTerralever
10XMarketing

Leanna Pham

Convince & Convert
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Tim Williams, CEO of Onalytica, joins the Social Pros podcast to talk about the power and rising popularity of influencer marketing in the B2B space.

Bringing Credibility and Trust to BrandsWhat B2B Influencers Get Paid and Why

Tim Williams, CEO of Onalytica, is on the Social Pros podcast to discuss the rise of B2B influencers, how much they get paid, and the best practices for working with them.
Tim takes us into the story of what Onalytica does for brands and shares why he thinks influencers have become so key to the marketing world. He explains that there’s a major trust problem with brands, meaning that marketing is starting to lose its effect – paving the way for influencers to save the day.
Tim discusses Onalytica’s recent B2B Influencer Compensation Report and what the data shows about how much influencers are paid around the world. He also shares some red flags that brands and influencers should watch out for before starting a partnership.

In This Episode:

  • 4:08 – Tim explains the different stages businesses want to work with influencers
  • 5:58 – Why influencers are replacing the trust that brands have lost
  • 8:14 – How B2B has started to embrace influencer marketing
  • 10:54 – What the B2B Influencer Compensation Report says about payments
  • 14:40 – How the expectations of influencers differ around the world
  • 17:37 – How to measure the effectiveness of B2B influencers
  • 20:25 – Deciding how many influencers and what type of influencers to hire
  • 22:41 – How the demand for influencers is creating new roles in the B2B space
  • 25:40 – Tim explains the difficulty of managing influencers in a broader business structure
  • 28:03 – How Onalytica helps clients determine what employees would make good influencers
  • 30:07 – How the expectations of influencers have changed
  • 35:27 – Tim explains how influencer marketing and account-based marketing will work together
  • 38:56 – Red flags that influencers should be aware of before working with a brand
  • 43:58 – Tim’s top tip for someone wanting to become a social pro or an influencer marketing manager

Quotes From This Episode:

“Brands spend crazy amounts of money on white papers or $30,000 to $50,000 on really big pieces of content. I think that can be diverted to more credible voices.” Click To Tweet
“When you’re working with someone new, I would work with them on something safe so that you feel comfortable.” @WilliamsTim
“How do you build your brand credibility and trust and have that overarching vision? I think employee-generated content and influencer-generated content are a massive part of that going forward.” @WilliamsTim

Resources:

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b2b influencer

Episode Transcript

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Tim

Williams:

There's

actually very low trust out there. And so instead of brands telling everyone how great they are and you’re advertising arguably being less effective than it was previously brands were looking for third party, your credible voices to be able to tell the stories that the brands to convey to their audiences.

Jay

Baer:

Adam,

we’ve been so fortunate to have lots of guests here on social pros that have talked about influencer marketing. We’ve had Neil Schaffer and Jason falls and Alicia and, and a number of other people, especially those who have written great books about it. Today’s episode with Tim Williams. The, the CEO of Onalytica I think, is, is tremendous. It really goes into the state of the union on B2B influencer marketing, how it works, how it doesn’t work and why, and what he said there at the top of the show about trust, being the lever for the growth and influencer marketing. Boy, talk about a, a timely

Adam

Brown:

Topic.

It is a timely topic. And I, I really like this episode. We oftentimes talk about how social is, is a combination of art and science. And even as you just mentioned, influencer marketing is, is very much the art and science. This unlike some of our other guests is really about the science and this influencer compensation report and understanding the hows and the whys and the ones and the zeros of what makes a good influencer, what you can expect from an influencer and how it’s gonna have an impact on your bottom line. Tim is, is such a great guest. Today,

Jay

Baer:

If

you’re in B2B, this is gonna be one of your favorite episodes of the year. And I can promise you that here in January, 2022, but I feel like even if you’re on the consumer side, you should, of this wanna listen, because it really talks about some of the important mechanics about doing influencer marketing correctly. Speaking of doing things correctly, in order to help you do just that, I wanna make sure that you’ve had a chance to download the Salesforce state of marketing report. It’s the seventh edition of that research in this part version, the Salesforce team pulled together the insights from 8,000 marketers across 37 countries. And, and it is a flotilla of goodness. It is amazing how many interesting stats and trends they, they came up with. I’ve been talking about the contents of this report, not just here on social pro, but in lots of webinars and speeches and other podcasts I’ve been doing. It is really that good. I think it’s some of the best research ever done in the history of digital marketing. And I’m not kidding. Make sure you grab a copy of it. Bitly slash state of marketing report B I T dot Y slash state of marketing report. I’m Jay Baer from convince and convert. He’s Adam Brown from Salesforce, our guest this week, Tim Williams from Onalytica. Here he comes

Jay

Baer:

Today

in the show. We’re excited to talk about B to B influencer marketing. Our guest this week has pulled back the curtain on the mechanics of B2B influencer marketing. He’s contributed probably more to knowledge of the topic than maybe anybody else on this planet. It is Tim Williams, the chief executive officer of Onalytica joins us Tim. Welcome to social pros.

Tim

Williams:

Thank

you so much, Jay. Thanks. How extremely pleased to be here. Kicking off 2022 in style.

Jay

Baer:

Indeed.

Style is the correct approach to 2022, cuz that’s all we got left, Tim. I think it would be wise to just frame up for the social pros community, what Analytica does and how the platform works. And then we’ll talk about the report that we did together.

Tim

Williams:

Yeah.

Great. Thank you. So on let go, we were founded in 2009 and we are an influence marketing platform that helps connect brands and influence communities together. And, and they, the express purpose is to create inspiring content for the end target audience.

Jay

Baer:

And

so your customers who are in B2B will use the platform to identify and, and activate influencers, determine who’s connected to whom across which topics, et cetera.

Tim

Williams:

Yeah,

exactly. There are five stages, there’s a discovery stage. And then there’s an insight stage on, on how well your brand’s doing with the influence communities, but also, you know, which influences are right for your particular, you know, and program or campaign. And what are the influencers looking for out of the deal. Then there’s an activation stage, which is actually the contacting and saying, Hey, would you like to be part of, you know, this collaboration? And then there’s the management of influencers, which is ongoing management rather than like one and done, you know, just post this content and see you later. And then there’s a measurement part. You’re looking at what the brands actually get out of it that kind of uplift from the influence of generated content. And then really it’s about scaling that whole process. And, you know, we’ve done a lot of work, especially with tech brands globally to try and help people go from campaign to always on program and the scaling up. So those five stages are really what we help our clients to achieve

Jay

Baer:

Certainly

on the right side of history because Adam, the Salesforce state of marketing report, which I just told you all to download has amongst many other interesting statistical findings one that says that 92% of companies are either using influencer marketing already or plan to do so in 2022, that, that is almost uniformly used Adam, why do you think that is?

Adam

Brown:

I,

I think there’s a lot of reasons for that, Jay. And thank you for, for pulling that out. I think this convergence of video, which is another big kind of key metric that we saw in the state of marketing port and the importance of video, both as produced video and user-generated content, which gets us closer to influencer video and the need for influencers have increased. And, and that actually begs a question, Tim, I would have for you, sir. How has the pandemic had an influence on influencers?

Tim

Williams:

Yeah,

I th I, I think that’s, that’s a really, really good question. I think just going back pre pandemic, I think there was a big trust and credibility issue with brands. And I think trust is at an all time low. You know, if you look at the Edelman trust barometer, and a lot of your studies out there, then your people don’t trust your C-suite. They don’t trust government. They don’t trust journalists. There’s actually very low trust out there. And so instead of brands telling everyone how great they are and, you know, advertising arguably being less effective than it was previously brands were looking for third party, your credible voices to be able to tell the stories that the brands want to convey to their audiences. So that that includes employees and, you know, external influences. And then what happened is when the pandemic hit, I think, you know, everyone went into a tailspin, right.

Tim

Williams:

You

know, in terms of the marking events, you know, no one knew what they were doing. They were either canceled or they were all online, the online experiences. Weren’t great. And you know, what happened was, I think there was an acceleration of the influencer generated content, you know, maybe about five or six years where there wasn’t any other choice, but then to go digital. And, and then there was also trends coming from this, from salespeople, not wanting to be salespeople, wanting to educate their perspective buyer. And I think all of this, you know, happened and culminated in influence marketing becoming, as you said that 92% of brands, you know, either investing or planning to invest in it next year, it was probably about, you know, 40 or 50% and, you know, two or three years ago,

Adam

Brown:

You

know, Jay and I are kind of OGs in the social and public relations marketing space. And I can remember a time where we would kind of see journalists as those third party influencers that would add credibility, obviously as part of this. And I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, Tim, but journalists seem to also be having a trust challenge right now, is that accurate? And do you think that’s part of the reason we’re going to influencers and other people for that credibility to up level our message in our brand?

Tim

Williams:

I

think that’s interesting point, I couldn’t comment directly on whether journalists are, are losing trust. Cause I don’t think I’m the right right person to comment on that. But I would say that I saw, you know, 15 years ago how the beauty and fashion industries, you know, put the bloggers on the same, you know, front front chairs as the journalists, like back in the day. And I think B2B has started doing that over the past five years. So that influencer, I think you commented on our Jay about the the journal, the, the, the influencers, sorry, having the same credibility as the independent analysts. And, and I think that, you know, is now coming into the B2B space. And I think it’s not only just looking at, at one particular type of influencer and, and we do so much work on this and it kind of drives me a bit mad when people are talking about mega influences, nano influences and micro influences and, and all these, all these kind of terms, because I don’t think they mean anything to people.

Tim

Williams:

I

think they’re just talking about people with high reach on Instagram or something like that. So I think that the word influencer you know, it can be a journalist, it can be an analyst, it can be an event speaker. Obviously you do a lot of event speaking, you know, Jay there’s consulting, there’s people who are writing long form content. There’s also content creators. There’s there are new roles coming into into the industry. And so I think that it’s no longer PR just having to work with journalists or analyst relations, just working with analysts. I think it’s it, it’s merging all of this. And I think that brings a challenge for brands because they’ve hired people in AR to manage analysts, public relations, to manage journalists. And often people don’t have people in influence, but it, it needs to fit within some organizations. So I know it’s, it’s not directly answering a question, but I think it’s, it’s just become much wider. And it’s, it’s really what is influencing the end customer. And I think brands just need to evolve. And they’re probably a couple of years to, to actually get ahead of that curve because I think a lot of them behind especially the, the ones that are not the early adopters,

Jay

Baer:

I'm

glad you mentioned the report, Tim social pros, listeners, what I’d like you to do in just a moment, pause this episode, pull up a browser and download this report that Tim’s team collaborated on with the convince to convert team it’s called the B2B influencer compensation report. You can get at no cost at Bitly slash compensation report. That’s B I T dot L Y slash compensation report all lowercase. So the analytic team led by their amazing marketing head Le Russell surveyed some 700 B2B influencers in the us in the UK and across continental Europe and asked them, what do you do for, for clients? As Tim mentioned, you’ve got videos, you’ve got event coverage, you’ve got eBooks and webinars and, and maybe like a puppet show bar mitzvah. There’s a lot of different things. DJ set. There’s a lot of pieces that, that B to be influencers will do.

Jay

Baer:

But

more importantly, the question was asked, cool, what do you actually charge for that thing? Because if, if B2C influencer marketing has been quote unquote, the wild west B2B influencer marketing is, is something less organized than that historically in terms of codified pricing and, and just ways of doing business. So this is quite literally the first report ever that identifies what B2B influencers charge brands to do. Things like host a podcast, or write a series of blog posts, or do a webinar, or cover your event with LinkedIn lives or live tweets, et cetera. It is incredibly valuable and even more so because the data is broken down by geography. And that’s the question for you, Tim? It was fascinating to me as somebody who contributed to the report and also does a fair bit of B2B influencer content creation, et cetera, some interesting differences, especially in pricing between the us and the UK and, and Europe. Do you feel like B2B influencer marketing is, is more mature or less mature in some of those regions?

Tim

Williams:

Yeah,

I, I, I think that was one of the key takeaways and one of the surprising things that I that I discovered when I saw the analysis in each particular category, whether we were talking podcasts or event speaking or writing a long form article, then there was 50 to a hundred percent increase in, in rates, you know, from north America than, you know, Western Europe. And, and I feel like, you know, having lived in the us for for, for, for one to two years, I just feel like it’s, it’s more of a practice that people are happy to, to work on a pay to play basis. And I think there’s just more appetite with especially American headquarter brands to, to put money into innovation or to, to practices, which aren’t, you know, necessarily carried out by lots of competitors. I think it’s a much more European cultural thing to kind of see who’s doing it first and then jump in.

Tim

Williams:

Whereas

in the us, it’s like, I wanna be that first, you know, brand and I want to innovate. And, you know, I, I obviously you love that attitude because it promotes the industry. And so I, I think, I think the budgets are a bit bigger. There’s just a bit more, you know, confidence and ambition. But I think that, you know, Western Europe are catching up pretty quickly. And, and I think that sometimes it’s a bit more nuanced when you get European, you know, marketing managers are wanting to do this. They have so many markets to try and cover. So you’ve got UK, France, Germany, Spain Italy is the kind of main markets that people would want to invest in. And sometimes it’s, it’s difficult to to pay as much for an influence in one market because you might have to serve, you know, five to seven markets in the us. You can probably, you know, work with five to 10 influences and say the, of their kind of us global, and you, you can put a bit more budget towards it.

Adam

Brown:

A

50%, you know, difference in, in, in pricing is, is pretty considerable. Especially when you take into consideration Tim, one of the other statistics out of the report that this is a $15 billion industry which, which just was, was blew me away. I’m curious if the expectations of north American social media, you know, and, and, and influencer managers are different. I mean, is there, are, are we getting anything else here in north America for that 50% increase as it relates to reporting as it relates to follow up or analytics? Or is it just, this is the, the price that of goods paid here in the states? Yeah,

Tim

Williams:

I,

I think that’s actually the right question to ask because I often think, you know, is it different? I don’t think it is different. I think that you know, I see brands going through waves of, you know, influences must generate this many leads and, and then they focus on that. And then, you know, someone in the organization, the CMO might say, I think we need to work on brand. You know, I think we need to drive some demand generation is not just about like campaign lead you know, campaign campaigns, driving leads with influence, and then they go into the awareness and engagement. Conversely, when brands don’t have the buy-in for influence marketing from senior management, they feel like they have to drive leads because it’s an easy ROI argument to try and win. I think both in Europe and, and north America, everyone’s trying to do the same thing.

Tim

Williams:

They're

trying to, they’re trying to drive brand aware, NS and brand perception and credibility and trust, but they’re also trying to drive leads unless if you’re talking about, you know, digital coms, you know, when they’re obviously working much more on brand reputation, less than leads. So I don’t see any difference within that. I think it’s more of an individual maturity on whether people have enough budget to go and innovate or get it established as a practice. And the brands that we work for, like the likes of Microsoft and IBM and Erickson, for example, have spent the last five or six years establishing this as a practice. And, you know, five years ago, it was really trying to drive, you know, millions of impressions on Twitter, you know, with, with like, you know, 10 influences. And now it’s something where they just sometimes create inspiring content. And there’s not many big outcomes in terms of what their content’s got to achieve because it’s repurposed across their employee advocacy tool. It’s shared with their senior execs, they form relationships. You know, there’s just so much value across the whole organization that they’re not, you know, having to ask those instant return on investment questions. I think that’s just part of the maturity of the industry. I don’t see any differences between Europe and us in, in that particular in that particular field,

Jay

Baer:

I

would think there’s some differences between B2 C influencer marketing and B2 B influencer marketing in terms of measure Tim only because the sales cycle is so much longer in most B2B organizations and the quality of the lead is so much more critical to B2B there, there’s not that many bad leads on the consumer side. But on the B2B side, lead quality is such a major part of the marketing assignment, especially that, that I, I completely agree with with your statement that if we’re gonna measure B2B influencer marketing, purely on the basis of revenue generated, or even on net new leads, that’s a tough assignment just because of the nature of, of B2B purchases.

Tim

Williams:

Would

you agree? Yeah, I, I think hundred percent and, you know, so to give you a case study, I mean, we work with IBM around the think event, for example, and drive 36% of their social registrations through, I think it was 11 influences you know, that, that they used last year and, you know, there, there was a higher attendance rate out of the people that converted through that. So, you know, that’s great and there’s obviously intrinsic value there, but then you can follow the registrations of the people that have, you know, sign up for events and then you can follow the customer journey. You can start monetizing and looking at, you know, what the conversion rates, and if you connect up all of these metrics, you can get that, that ROI formula. But I see it as a bit like social media back in 2006, 2007, people were saying, why should you try and monitor who’s who’s talking about your brand and can, can you tell me the ROI of social media listening and stuff like that?

Tim

Williams:

People

don’t ask that anymore. And actually it was quite frustrating. I think I was in San Francisco, I think 2006, 2007, and people was saying, you know, what’s the ROI of social media. And I think it was just a natural question because people didn’t know exactly what value it gave. And yeah, so I think it’s, it’s so much more nuanced in B2B. I, I think you’re right, Jay. I mean, in B2C, you can look at, you know, how, how many product sales are driven by, you know, an Instagram influencer, for example, it’s very binary and you can see how much engagement they get as a direct engagement on their post. I think when you’re looking at LinkedIn and Twitter and social networks, the content is shared maybe through LinkedIn and Twitter, then through second, third, fourth degree networks, it’s then downloaded, maybe shared by WhatsApp.

Tim

Williams:

It

could be emailed through and yeah, there’s a lot of dark social as well. So it, it’s a, it’s a much more complicated beast. And, you know, I think it’s really important to get the quick wins in terms of influencer generated content drove this much more awareness than brand generated content or, you know, contributed to demand gen in terms of content downloads. That’s important, but there’s a much bigger thing at play, which is how do you build your brand credibility and trust and have the overarching vision? I think employee generated content and influencer generated content are a massive part of that going forward. And I think it brands divert some of the content creation, you know, when they spend the amounts of money on white papers or 30 to $50,000 on, on really big pieces of content. I think that can be diverted to more credible voices just as a tactic overall to, to really achieve competitive advantage over the long term.

Adam

Brown:

Tim,

one of the things you mentioned with that very impressive IBM program was that you used 11 influencers there. What does your rubric, or what does the equation look like when you determine, okay, would we rather have five or six, five star influencers, so to speak, you know, versus 12 or 15 three star influencers, how do you kind of calculate that? What does that, what pro what thought process goes into that consideration?

Tim

Williams:

Yeah,

I think so. We tend to, and I probably, you know, go straight into this of longer term vision, cuz I’m passionate about what success looks like. And I think success is I say it as a pyramid where the top segment is your, your retained, you know, paid influences that are aligned with your brand and they’re, and they’re creating wonderful content for you and, and maybe speaking to your execs and just helping drive, you know, innovation and inspiration within the industry. So I think that’s good to have maybe, you know, five in handful of influencers, maybe 10, if you are of a mature brand doing this. And then I, then I think you’ve got the industry experts. A lot of these people wouldn’t expect payment. They wouldn’t call themselves influences, but they have tremendous expertise that your subject matter experts in your brand or your execs might just naturally have a conversation with on social.

Tim

Williams:

So

I think that segment is where the real it happens because it’s not on a pay to play basis and it’s really about relationships and it’s about advocacy. So we talk about influence marketing, but I think our passion is really around advocacy and, and relations. And then there’s that much longer tell, which is the lighter touch where you’re, maybe you are social monitoring. And when you’re an industry talks about your particular topic, you, you might jump into a conversation and establish that, that sense of relationship and, and extended community. So it’s a question which comes up all the time, you know, should we, should we, should we engage 30 influencers? Should we engage one to two? The brands normally start with one to two because that seems more manageable. But I think the real success is when you are set up for management at scale, and of course that needs technology that needs agency support and that needs you know, investment by the brand over time.

Jay

Baer:

Tim,

you mentioned earlier this notion of sort of influencer marketing managers and as more and more B2B companies pursue this style of awareness, building content creation, lead generation, et cetera, are, are you seeing more brands actually create positions inside their marketing organization to run the influencer marketing program? Do, do you feel like that’s going to be a standard role in a of B2B companies going forward?

Tim

Williams:

Yeah.

I, I love that question because we did some research actually on the customer buyer personas just the other day. And there are, according to LinkedIn, there are hundred and 60,000 I, or people on LinkedIn that talk about influence marketing in their profile. There are also 20,000 influence marketers for large enterprises and large enterprises are people sorry, organizations with over 200 employees. So there’s obviously a lot of people that are talking about influence market, their profile, but that doesn’t compare to 56 million people who are, who are marketers or, you know, 6 million in digital comp and PR or, or 7 million in social media marketing. So at the moment, I don’t see that every brand is investing in influence marketing specific roles. I think it’s 10% of a lot of marketers roles and quite often it’s in digital coms or PR. I see actually in B2B, a lot of influence relations now coming under analyst relations. So they’ve, they’ve actually moved ilin because it influencer marketing was this, this kind of department, but they’ve, they’ve moved, influenced marketing under B2C because people associated with Instagramers and they’ve moved influencer relations under the analyst relations. And, you know, I think that’s a really interesting trend in the marketplace. And we’ve seen that there’s actually many people with the, the word analyst relations and influence relations in their job title. And, you know, and that I think really is, is a hint of what we can, we can see over the next couple of years

Adam

Brown:

Related

to that, Tim, it seems like there is kind of a, a convergence here, if you will. I mean, if you think about what we’re talking about here with social influencers, we think of the spokesperson that a brand may have, or a celebrity who’s in the TV commercials and may speak at the trade show. If we think of public relations, investor relations, analyst relations, all those seems to be having many of the same types of trappings. So it appears the same thing that happened with social pros over the past decade or so as, as that role gets converged is happening with influential relations.

Tim

Williams:

Yeah.

absolutely. I think that there is massive convergence and, and I think that a couple of years ago there were especially in a cause we’re talking about B2B influence marketing, and there were teams created to, to try and manage these these anomaly influences as they called them. They didn’t fit into any of the buckets, but now I think, you know, it’s, it’s really just a, a, a massive convergence into some people were, I can tell you, or there’s some influences that I hear brands talking about and they ping them between public relations, marketing, and analyst relations saying, who’s gonna manage this person because they’re an analyst. They also feel like a journalist and they’re also a content creator. And, you know, and actually, you know, it’s really difficult to know how to manage them cause they’ve got a big social influence as well.

Tim

Williams:

So

I think that’s the fascinating part. And, and, you know, I love, you know, changing markets because we’re, we’re a technology provider and we wanna provide technology. It doesn’t matter to us, you know, who manages them. We just, we just love working with the influencers because we know that they influence the end target customer. But I think it’s a massive challenge for brands, how they, how they evolve their teams. And, you know, a lot of people might ask their social media marketing team to manage these influencers. But a lot of the social media marketers might not be the people to build the best relationships. Whereas like public relations are amazing at building relationships or analyst relations, but marketing build programs at scale and analyst relations and public relations. Don’t do that in my opinion as effectively. So I think there’s all these convergences that these challenges, and I think that’s part of the fun over the, over the late is five years

Jay

Baer:

Friends,

the report is called the B2B influencer compensation report. Make sure you download at no cost Bitly slash compensation report B I T dot Y slash compensation report, all lower case. Tim Williams, the CEO of Analytica, the company that produced the report is our guest is week on social pros that convinced a convert team and myself contributed to the report as well. And Tim, you mentioned a bit ago, this idea that that B2B influence also has to include employees and, and customers. And I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been writing about that for years and years and years does on Analytica help brands discern, which of their employees are disproportionately influential because that’s always been a, a sticky wicket for employee advocacy programs is all right. If we’ve got 10,000 global employees, certainly some of them have disproportionate influence, who are they and how do we activate them from the inside out?

Tim

Williams:

Yeah,

the thanks to absolutely we treat employees exactly the same as we would treat external influences. So we have a an influencer methodology to work out how influential they are. And the interesting thing about employee advocacy tools is that they are, they are designed for for mass employees to be able to leverage, to, to share content and okay, it’s not all brand content that they have to share. Sometimes there’s curated third party content, but mostly there’s a lot of practice of people oversharing the same content. And the key is that execs and subject matter experts who are trying to create good thought leadership content want to connect with external people to drive impact with their particular target audience. And so the employee obviously tools out there are not serving that subject matter expert in execs because none of the execs or subject matter experts want to be the same as any other employee. So I, so we contributed to an, an ebook around employee advocacy, 2.0 which was the employee led buyer journey. And we did that alongside tribal impact to talk about how you can segment your employees into different personas and connect them up to external influences. And, and that’s a really, really key part of thing of what’s gonna drive the drive the customer journey,

Adam

Brown:

Tim,

as we talk about influencers here and, and you’ve already noted you know, some types of influence are, are on page. You’re looking at your ambassadors, you’re looking at your employees and finding ways of, of working the best with them paid influence, obviously a, a big piece of this as well. And I’m curious, kind of as social pros, especially in the B2B space, begin to use more and more influencers have the expectations of those influencers changed expectations as it relates to the actual work product that the influencer is going to create expectations around exclusivity that you’re not gonna do something for a, a competing brand for a certain period of time. All the other things in terms of expectations around you are representing our brand and you better not do anything that’s, you know illegal or unethical. What, what can the social pro expect today in 2022? Yeah.

Tim

Williams:

I

love that, that actually I was talking to a an influencer just yesterday and we were talking about exclusivity and, and I think when you’ve made it as an influencer, you don’t offer exclusivity because you feel like an independent analyst in the industry and you’ve got enough business. I mean, some of them are, some of them are earning a million dollars from, from influencing and, you know, and have, you know, so much demand that why would they change, you know, what what’s working for them at the moment. So I think that they wouldn’t offer exclusivity, but there are lots of influences who are up and coming that would offer exclusivity. I know that brands are uneasy about working with influences that they haven’t worked with in the past. And there’s a, and so our advice to them would be work on a recorded basis.

Tim

Williams:

And

then you can repurpose the content rather than going on a LinkedIn live, you know, straight off. And so I think these are, these are the right questions. These are the trends and the, the ways that the industry is evolving. And when I speak to the influencer community, cuz we have relationships with thousands of of influences I say to them that the brands are gonna be expecting, you know, more from them, you know, this coming year and they do need to show the ROI of their own content. They can’t just create content and just say, okay, well, hope that’s good enough. They have to come to the table if there’s more and more people who are willing to create content and actually put some measurement towards it. So I think that’s part of the professionalization and the maturity of the industry. I don’t really like exclusivity.

Tim

Williams:

I

think that they should be that that’s personally. I just, I just think that it should be like an analyst like a journalist and that they should continue rate industry content, but the brands are the ones that enable them to create the thought leadership content. So in B2B, just to put it maybe more clearly, it’s not about saying that Microsoft is better than Ericson or better than IBM. It’s about you as a brand investing influencer generated content on a topic that you think the, your target audience is really interested in and all of that attention and credibility will then go to you as the brand. So I think it’s very different than a B to C, which is by my product. And, you know, here’s the link to the B2B it’s, it’s, it’s almost not selling, it’s just trying to bring the audience into, into your particular website or event. You’ve

Jay

Baer:

Sort

of taken a, a, a happy medium approach. I think to that question, Tim convince and convert and myself, of course, we do a lot of B2B influencer marketing work and webinars and kind 10 creation and research and reports. So we’ve used exclusivity as, as sort of a, a deal size creator and, and a funnel acceleration tool in that if you spend a certain threshold of dollars with the organization over the course of a year, so it’s a package of multiple webinars and reports and videos and podcasts or, or, or whatever the combination of assets are. If you hit this threshold, then we give you what we call the three strikes. So you can name three competitors that, that we won’t work with beyond those three, all bets are off, but we, we give those sort of tier one partners, just a little it of a, of an exclusivity, just so that they feel like it truly is a partnership more so than a transactional relationship.

Jay

Baer:

And,

and I feel like in the B to B influencer marketing space, there’s still some, some confusion, especially for companies that are doing this for the first time, or haven’t done it very much. IBM’s a different example. They’ve been active in it for so many years now. It still feels like a transaction, right? In, in a lot of cases, it’s like here’s some money make me a webinar. Here’s some money make me an ebook. And they haven’t yet gotten to the idea of let’s have 11 influencers that we’re gonna work with every month, over years, partially because some of these companies don’t have that influencer marketing manager role that you talked about. So I don’t think there’s a, a right answer necessarily, but that’s what we tried to do last year. And this year is, is, say, okay, if we’re really going to, to have a partnership, we’ll, we’ll give you a little exclusivity. So your number one enemy, isn’t also working with us, but, but certainly not a categorical relationship where we’re not gonna work with anybody else in the space. Yeah.

Tim

Williams:

That,

yeah. And I, I, I, I, I think that makes sense. I think from the influencers standpoint, some of them have been successfully working with your 50 of the global tape brands and obviously have made it to that stage. The other ones are finding ways in which they can build that, that, that their USPS and their value in. And yeah, I think it, I think it can be a good tool. It’ll be very interesting to see how, how it plays out.

Jay

Baer:

I

had a somewhat related question, which is, if you think about the big trends in B2B marketing, certainly two of the top four, probably maybe two of the top two would be influencer marketing and account based marketing ABM. How do you see those two working together? Are, are they going to converge? So sort of like, Hey, let’s think about ABM marketing. And let’s use a tool like Analytica to figure out which customers are influential. And therefore let’s sell differently to those customers because they, then if they’re happy, can spread the word to the next generation of customers. I, I see influencer marketing and ABM, not as two sides of the same coin, but, but certainly two paths in the same forest, if nothing else. Yeah.

Tim

Williams:

I,

we’ve done a lot of trying to link, influence marketing to ABM. So I can speak to some of the examples that we’re working through right now with some of our clients. I think one perspective is we see influence marketing about creating inspiring influencer generated content. Once you’ve got the content, you can repurpose it into assets that sales people can use in social selling and targeting ABM or to key target accounts as part of your account based marketing strategy. So the influencer content that we’ve helped our clients generate has been used to drive business within key target accounts B if the influence marketing progress is linked up with the marketing and the, and the sales organization, especially with the sales people being subject matter experts and connecting with those influences. So that’s very, very powerful, not many organizations are connecting the two, there’s a, there’s another way to look at it, which I think was what you were talking about as well, Jay, which is customer advocacy.

Tim

Williams:

So

Weve, we’ve worked with some brands again, global tech brands to provide access to external influences for customers that are advocating and are socially influential from some of our customers. So basically if we work with a tech brand, you know, and they have, you know, 3000 customers, we would identify who’s most socially influential and offer them like a V I P access to external influences. And they would create content with those external influences as part of a win-win for customers feeling great about, you know, being a customer of that brand, but also creating content, which is going to drive more customers within key target accounts. So those are two segues in which we’ve been able to link influences with ABM. And, you know, I, I think that they’re really, really exciting areas. I think that sometimes it takes a little while for organizations to start speaking to each other. Because often you’re just introducing people from different departments. And you know, that that will take maybe I think 12 to 24 months to, to see a bit more maturity.

Adam

Brown:

Jay.

I love that question. And Tim, I so appreciate your answer on that. As it relates to ABM account based marketing and influencer relationship marketing kind of converging. In fact, one of the things I often talk about with our Salesforce customers is this idea that ABM is, is evolving to a, a Abe account based engagement. And that engagement piece is getting to all these kind of intangibles that we have to find a way to make tangible so that we can, and we can measure it. Tim, I’ve got one last question for you, obviously social media influencing marketers, you know, are using a variety of different ways to, to look and analyze, you know, which influencers should we use. And, and auto Analytica is, is certainly a, a key tool in that. Are there any other ways, you know, kind of a cloud 2.0 that media influencers can really start to gauge whether this is a right fit, so to speak for a particular brand. And are there any red flags that influencing marketers and social media people need to be aware of when they’re evaluating social influence?

Tim

Williams:

Yeah,

I think, I think to take the red flag is first anyone that has bought followers or is not, is not credible or is using bots to drive their engagement. And if they’re doing that, you know, I don’t, I don’t mind if, if people have a good setup where they’re able to drive their engagement, but if it’s, if it’s fake, then obviously that that’s a real red flag. I think some influences, egos have got a bit outta control. I’m not talking about loads of them, but a few of them, and sometimes they don’t provide a good brand experience. So I think the red flag there is when you’re working with someone new, I would, I would work with them with something safe so that you can feel comfortable. And I think those are the main red flags. One more red flag would be to not ask them to say something good about your brand to make it about the, the thought leadership topic because then they show up as their best self and it’s not transactional.

Tim

Williams:

So

I think those are some of the red flags. I think, how to measure someone’s influence. I mean, we use for ours, which is your reach number of followers, relevance, the amount of content that they’re producing on your topic, and then resonance, which is engagement metric, and then reference, which is the authority within their industry. So those are for RS there’s, there’s also some qualitative measures looking at their, their expertise their influence and the ability to create content. I think a lot of brands are looking for agile thought leadership content creation, and to be able to create your 20 20 content assets on a particular topic you’re within a couple of days, is what they’re looking for. And sometimes that’s hard. In-House so I think that there’s a number of different quantitative and qualitative factors with influences. One piece of advice I would give is you don’t try and over measure whether the influence is right.

Tim

Williams:

I've

seen brands, you pass around a list of 50 names who are the, who are the world’s best influences. And, and they’ve actually said no to all of them, because someone has said, actually they work with the competitor, or they mentioned something about politics the other day, or actually I don’t like this one piece of content that they posted two years ago. And then you end up saying, okay, so you’re gonna work with zero with them. And they said, no, no, no. I, I think, I think we would like to work with them. And so sometimes it can be over, are analyzed and you just need to put a bit of budget towards it, try to create some influence to generate the content, think about what’s in it for the influencer, because then you get the best inspiring content. And I think then the journey takes you on a re you know, on a really nice road to be able to achieve what you want.

Jay

Baer:

Yeah.

One of the things that we do a lot of convince and convert is, is use tools like Analytica to come up with that initial list. And then if we have the time and the budget to do so, we’ll actually do a survey of existing customers of our partners and say, here’s 30 people tell us which of these people you trust, which of them you trust less, and which of them we’ve never heard of. So we actually validate the info on software findings with a survey of actual people. And that’s been really, really effective every time we’ve done it. And Tim, I couldn’t agree more with your, your first point that, that in large measure, because so much of what B2B companies ask influencers to do is to make stuff at some level. The, the difference between being a B2B influencer and a content marketing agency is, is almost one of taxonomy, more so than in tactics, in many cases because it’s the same kind of things that you would have an agency do. It just doesn’t have that sort of third party lift built in because it’s created by an influencer.

Tim

Williams:

Exactly,

exactly. And not many influencers are have the content machines that, that are just there. But that actually a few of, of the really professional ones are trying to build out teams because they’re realizing that, that they need support, but the majority of people obviously need agency support and, and you know, obviously in-house direction as well.

Jay

Baer:

I

was 10 years ahead of my time I in the content machine simultaneously. So everybody who wants to figure out how to do it, call me, I’ll help you go to Bitly slash compensation report to download. First of its kind, really proud of it. Tim’s team did an amazing job. It is extraordinary B2B influencer compensation report. You will absolutely love it. Tim. We’re gonna ask you the questions. We ask everybody here on social pros. First, what one tip would you give somebody looking to become a social pro or perhaps an influencer marketing manager?

Tim

Williams:

Yeah,

I think the one tip and I, I alluded to it a, a bit before. Don’t think about what you can get as a brand first, even though you might be under pressure to to prove as certain outcome always think about what’s in it for the influencer and keep your brief open so that you can say, look, we’d like to create some content in this area. These are some of our objectives. What do you think? And what would, what would make a difference to you? Because when you turn it into something that the influencer feels passionate about, you will get the brand metrics that you are looking for because they’ll wanna show up. So I think that’s, that’s something which is often overlooked and that will get you some really good results.

Jay

Baer:

That

is excellent advice. Last question for Tim Williams, CEO of Analytica, if you could do a video call with any living person, who would it be?

Tim

Williams:

I

was caught between David Attenborough or Martin Johnson, the the ex Ingler rugby captain, cuz I’m a big rugby fan. But I think climate change is probably a bit more important than rugby. So I think it would be David Adam, since I just love everything that he does and I could listen to his voice for hours and hours. And he he’s someone that I know influences globally and some of his experiences have been amazing. So I would, I would probably love to have a call with him and I would probably forget the time and you know hope, hope that he wouldn’t, you know, clock on after 10 minutes.

Jay

Baer:

Fun

fact when I wrote my book talk triggers with my good buddy Daniel lemon, when we launched the book we actually had videos of alpaca’s speaking and we hired a celebrity impersonator to do David borough’s voice for the book promotion videos. So it just made me laugh when you answered that, that that would, yeah, he’s a B2B influencer of source, right? Is he, is he in the database? That’s the question?

Tim

Williams:

Well,

I don’t think we, we do have celebrities in that. I’ll have to check I have to check, I haven’t looked it up but I will do that right now. Exactly.

Jay

Baer:

And

report back is sir David. Yes. Let us know. Yeah. We’ll put in the notes. Exactly. Tim, thanks so much for being here. We really appreciate it. Congratulations on all the success at Onalytica and on the report.

Tim

Williams:

Well

thank you to, to you and Adam and convincing, convert support in producing the Alliance was was amazing. So thank you for your contributions.

Jay

Baer:

Our

pleasure. Can’t wait to have you back on the best wishes to you for an extraordinary 2022 Adam, we learned a lot today. I feel like we did

Adam

Brown:

Learn

a lot. This is a topic that I think is near and dear to just about everybody who is listening and anybody who wants to be a social pro. These, these worlds are colliding as as George Castanza would say.

Jay

Baer:

Fantastic.

How on behalf of Adam Brown from Salesforce, I’m Jay Baer from convince and convert. We’ll see you next time on what is hopefully your favorite podcast in the entire world. This has been social pros, every single episode, transcripts links, goodies, et cetera. You can find it@socialpros.com. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

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EP 506 – Edited (Completed 02/09/22)

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