How to Make Any B2B Brand Sexy with Influencers

Eric : 1:00

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Yulia. She is a marketing, communications, pr and influencer expert, very excited about this episode today and talking about some of the strategies she's done with influencers A fascinating topic. She has over 10 years of experience and has worked with more than 30 brands on some really great, remarkable strategies. Welcome to the show today.

Yuliya: 1:29

Hey, eric, good to be here.

Eric : 1:32

Alright, so talk to us about influencer marketing before we jump into your story. Set the stage for us about influencer marketing. I think people might have some misconceptions about it.

Yuliya: 1:44

Yeah, just a brief background of who I am. As you mentioned, I've been in the industry for over 10 years now. I have a very versatile background, so I worked with consumer brands. I worked with brands like Gloria Maybelline, and then I, throughout my career, I pivoted and I now mostly work with software brands. Actually, it's like SaaS products enterprise software, mobile apps so I would say it's a very interesting combination of skills and experiences that I've had to be to have the opportunity to work with brands that are like so diverse. Yeah, today I run a marketing communications agency with primarily focus on influencer marketing and yeah, as you say, there are definitely there is a lot of buzz around influencer marketing, but I feel like there are also a lot of misconceptions. Some of the most common ones is that I feel that people who maybe have not really worked in the influencer space that much, when they hear the term influencer marketing, they often think about oh, this is your typical skincare product unboxing on Instagram, or maybe it's a game at integration on YouTube and that's what it's about. However, I'm a big believer in the power of influencer marketing and I experienced firsthand how it can work for a variety of brands. I literally believe that influencer marketing can be utilized by any brand. So, let's say you run a B2B company. There are so many ways that you can leverage influencers in your industry. You can work with opinion leaders, experts, and you can be really creative about how you partner with them. So, for example again, some of the misconceptions is that, well, influencer marketing is just a sponsored post. Like the creator, the influencer would come up with a publication that would be marked as this is a sponsored content, etc. As they say, when it comes to influencer partnerships, there is so much more that you can do In the example that I was sharing about the B2B companies, leverage those influencers at your brand events. Or maybe your company is attending an industry event so you can partner with an influencer, invite them to this industry convention and maybe co-host a session with them or sponsor the session that they will be hosting and get some organic mentions of your company. Another really cool tactic that I've witnessed is when brands are involving influencers, industry experts, in the product development cycle. So you can form an advisory board and invite the people who are very vocal in your industry and have them test your new product, your new feature, at the very early stages of development and provide feedback. By doing so, you making them feel like they're part of the brand, and then they would be. They basically would be feeling really good about going out there and talking about your brand, your product, as you release it. So number one biggest misconception that influencer marketing is limited to like specific platform or like a specific industry or niche. And no, it's like. You can be so creative and you can see so many examples of direct-to-consumer brands and business-to-business brands leveraging influencer partnerships.

Eric : 5:27

You're saying I don't have to dance or rap on TikTok.

Yuliya: 5:29

You're B2B influencer in a way, right Like you are a big name in the marketing industry Brands that are interested in maybe marketing their marketing automation software or like SEO, etc. You name it would be probably approaching somebody like you. I've been approached by a few companies who develop solutions for like influencer marketing automation, so platforms where you can discover influencers, you can manage your campaigns, etc. And they would be like asking for my feedback or even can I like mention their platforms in my content LinkedIn, etc. Yeah, if you are a listener and you work for a B2B brand, please learn more about what you can do with the experts in your industry. This is very exciting. Another thing that I want to briefly cover like another myth in the industry is that influencer marketing is like a purely awareness tactic. Oh, let's work with the influencers because we need to create some buzz about our new product or it's like one of our PR tactics, etc. This definitely is true. So, like influencers can generate huge buzz and awareness for your brand. However, you can also leverage influencers to drive sales directly, and actually, the clients that I work with within the within my agency I would say most of my clients are very much performance focused, so they don't care about like views, impressions. With some of my clients we don't even track these metrics because they don't care. They're like give me the sales, give me the return of our ad spend and these would be the metrics that they pay attention to. But if you run a company that is like direct to consumer, you can create those coupon codes for your influencers, you can set up those unique URLs for them and make sure you have this proper tracking in place to capture the full value of your influencer program. But again, biggest misconception influencers is just a PR slash, awareness type of campaign. No, it can be a very strong performance channel and it is very scalable.

Eric : 7:53

Show me the money. That's what people want. A lot of cases they don't just want followers or likes, right, they want to show me the money. Yeah, let me ask you are there platforms where people can go and hire influencers?

Yuliya: 8:10

Give me like a marketplace type of platform. Yeah, there are actually plenty of platforms. Actually, one of the recent developments that I am keeping track of is that the major social media themselves are starting to build these kind of instruments. For example, when it comes to dog, a while ago they launched TikTok Create a Marketplace where you, as a brand, as an advertiser, you can create your account and you can use this platform to discover influencers. On TikTok, by a certain keyword, you can get super detailed analytics on each influencer, like what their demographics look like, what their engagement views, et cetera, look like. You can actually get access to the data on what these TikTokers did for other brands. You can actually, through TikTok Create a Marketplace, you can see how other brand posts are performed on each particular influencer channel a very robust platform. If you're thinking about working with TikTokers, I would say TikTok Create a Marketplace. It's definitely worth checking out. However, if your campaign is not limited to just one channel, there are a lot of marketplaces where you can discover influencers, create your campaign requirements, et cetera, and you can either reach out to influencers through these platforms directly or you can have them apply to take part in your campaign. However, I would say there is a certain caveat to using these kind of marketplaces because from my experience and again, this is subjective, right, I'm talking about my experience, but at the same time we're talking about years of experience for working with multiple brands I would say that the best influencers influencers that perform really, who have a line of advertisers willing to work with them they won't be spending their time on these Marketplace platforms because they already have so much interest from the advertisers. They already have such high demand that you as a brand need to reach out to them or their agent representative directly and negotiate these brand deals in a very customized way. I would not automate this kind of interactions with those high performing influencers. I would say technology plays a very important part in the influencer discovery. So, yes, there are so many tools now which you can use for social media monitoring to see who is talking about certain subjects that are related to your industry, to your brand. You can see who's talking about your brand, potentially across different social platforms. So, yes, as an agency, we heavily use software for the influencer discovery process, but when it comes to actually hiring them, onboarding them, negotiating with them, we still feel like the human to human touch and connection are very important for the campaign success.

Eric : 11:35

That makes sense, so share with us what sort of success have you been able to generate for clients. Tell us a story about the best mass marketing you've done.

Yuliya: 11:46

OK. So my most favorite campaigns are when we partner with an influencer and then we're seeing a bunch of comments under the content that the influencer created for our brand client which are saying this is the best ad ever. And we actually, literally just yesterday, we launched a video like that with partnered with Comedian on YouTube. And just a quick note here I think my favorite part about working with influencers is that they can make any unsexy brand feel and look great. So if you're like, if you feel like you're working with a boring brand, I don't know, like you're selling some sort of I don't know Hellscare software or some insurance policies Et cetera, which may be not as hot as some of those consumer brands like Taco Bell, influencers can still make your brand stand out and basically they are like each influencer is a creative powerhouse and they bring their creativity when they talk about your brand. So what we did? We have one client in the cybersecurity space and cybersecurity already feels a little bit overwhelming. How do you make it fun? But we found a way to make it fun with partnered with a comedian who created a whole comedic kit around the issues that you might face when you use the internet issues related to your privacy, to your personal safety, et cetera. But she delivered it in a such a hilarious way that people are literally like commenting If that's a commercial. I want to sign up for the whole season because this ad is so smart and so clever. These are the success stories that we develop for our clients when we make even like unsexy brands look very cool. And I mean, it's not about looking cool, but it's about the brand messaging starting to make sense to the end consumer. So the influencer that you work with can actually talk about your brand in a very relatable way to their audience. They can break down your brand messaging, your brand value proposition, in a way that their community feels like oh wow, this sounds really great, I need to check it out. And, of course, as I said earlier, it all translates into sales. So everything we do is very much performance focused. It's not about just creating this funny video on YouTube or whatever. It's about driving traffic. It's about driving sales conversions. Yes, these are some of the things that I am definitely proud of creating ads that don't feel like ads. I think that's the best part.

Eric : 14:36

What's the hardest part about influencer marketing?

Yuliya: 14:41

The hardest part. I think I talk to a lot of people in the industry, to a lot of other influencer marketers. I would say the hardest part is finding the right influencers to work with, because on paper, a stern influencer might seem like a good fit, but then you launch an ad with them and it just doesn't bring any results. And it's like a gamble in a way. Yes, you do have your criteria for selecting the influencers. You can understand your demographics, your topics, et cetera, but still every new influencer partnership is always like a gamble where you, till the very last moment, you don't know how well it is going to perform. Finding the influencers who can actually move the needle for your brand, who can actually generate a response from the audience, who can encourage their audience to take the step and check out your brand this is the hardest part. Finding those top performers who can literally sell your brand to their community.

Eric : 15:53

So what kind of success or impact are you able to drive for your clients with?

Yuliya: 16:00

influencers.

Eric : 16:01

Is there a meaningful impact to their sales on that performance aspect that you're saying?

Yuliya: 16:07

Yes, the clients that we work with as an agency. Basically, they would not invest in their sluts to program if it did not generate sales for them. So we're all about growth that is based on the return of our ad spend, the way that we work with clients, especially when we onboard a new client. Brands are often very hesitant about spending on an influencer program. They don't know how it's going to work. So they usually start with kind of a smaller test budget and then, let's say, over the course of six months we double, we triple or sometimes even we have a 10x growth of the influencer spend because the brand is seeing the return in revenue.

Eric : 17:05

Yeah, that makes sense that people do a set function because they want to prove that it works. But in a lot of cases they wouldn't be increasing, doubling or tripling their investment if they weren't getting good results. Exactly, Exactly.

Yuliya: 17:22

So if they were to do a small test, they would be like, heck, yeah, I want more of that. I want more sales through this channel, ken, with scale it, so they put more money behind it and we go and find more influencers for their programs to generate more sales. Bye, bye.

Eric : 17:40

And so what are some of the most popular influencer channels? Like you mentioned TikTok, but is there really all the social channels? Is it LinkedIn, is it Instagram? Is it? Like which ones have you bought the most success with.

Yuliya: 17:54

I would say it all comes down to your brand, right? If you're like a working, if you're a marketer who is working for, let's say, an enterprise software company, then definitely you would do a working for influencers who are big on LinkedIn and or Twitter now acts, for instance, right, sometimes it's actually? At the beginning of this podcast, we spoke about B2B brands. Sometimes, when it comes to B2B, your influencers might not necessarily even have a big presence on a social media platforms, but they can be regular speakers at top industry events. So you don't have to limit yourself to like working with them on social media. You can partner with them as they speak to the media. Maybe they're featured in the news, etc. Maybe they speak on conventions so you can partner with them outside of the social media space. When it comes to like the social platforms, as I say, probably if you're in the B2B space, linkedin acts potentially Facebook as well can be your places to go to. And then the direct to consumer brands depends on the audience that you're targeting. I've worked across all social platforms. I want to also point out Twitch. I don't know if it's considered to be a social platform, but it's definitely a space where you can reach large audience and a very specific audience, so it's primarily a space for gamers. If you are targeting this particular group of consumers, you might look into this platform. Yeah, we definitely went as an agency. When we're approached by new clients, we try to understand where their audience lives and then we go after them on these platforms.

Eric : 19:51

Awesome. Thank you for these great insights. I encourage everyone listening to share this episode with your friends. People should know about these influencer strategies how to make any brand sexy with influencers. I love that and thanks for sharing all these insights with us today. We appreciate it. If you want to learn more, we'll link in the show notes to her website and her LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out. She's happy to have a conversation and answer any more questions that you have about these great influencer strategies.