How B2B Companies Can Use Influencer Marketing for Demand Generation, Interview with Joe Sinkwittz From Intellifluence | Episode #12

Marketing Cupcakes

Summary:

In today’s episode, we invite you to join our conversation with Joe Sinkwittz from Intellifluence, the largest online network of influencers.

Joe is going to teach you how you can leverage influencer marketing in the B2B space. Learn how you can quickly build social proof and tap into the power of word of mouth marketing by partnering with some of the most popular influencers in your niche.

Joe will share with you his best advice on how to find influencers that are the best fit for your product and he’ll also tell you how much money you’ll need to get started.

Tune in to find out how you, too can leverage the power of influencer marketing for B2B demand generation.

Highlights:

00:50 – How B2B companies can use influencer marketing for demand generation.

01:03 – Joe’s background: from competitive search to influencer marketing.

02:17 – So what is influencer marketing really?

05:03 – How do companies go about finding the best influencers for those B2B companies?

07:34 – The cost of influencer marketing.

09:18 – How to measure the effectiveness of an influencer campaign.

13:08 – How to get in front of those hard to reach executives.

15:18 – How much money do you need to get started with influencer marketing?

18:02 – Find out about the largest network of influencers, Intellifluence.

Resources / Links:

• com: http://enduur.com/
• CopyPress: http://www.copypress.com/
• FullContact: https://www.fullcontact.com/
• Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/
• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/
• BuzzSumo: http://buzzsumo.com/
• BuzzStream: http://www.buzzstream.com/
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
• Intellifluence: https://intellifluence.com/

Intro: Welcome to Marketing Cupcakes, a quantitative marketing podcast where we bring you the latest techniques in marketing analytics, data science, systems integrations, growth hacking, guerilla marketing and data architecting.

David: So welcome to another edition of Marketing Cupcakes, I’m your host Dave Gilbert and we’re privileged today to be here with Joe Sinkwittz, Joe did I pronounce your last name right?

Joe: Sinkwittz, yeah.

David: Awesome, perfect. So Joe wrote this pretty in depth article on influencer marketing and influencer marketing is something that has caught on in the past few years and has really erupted in the last little while. And so today we’re going to talk about how B2B companies can use influencer marketing for demand generation. Because historically a lot of B2C companies have thought of that as something that they can use but also B2B companies can do that as well.

So Joe, why don’t you take a minute and tell us about your background a little bit?

Joe: Sure, so Joe Sinkwittz, I’m CEO of Intellifluence. I’ve been in digital marketing this is now my 20th year. Hurray. Most of my time has actually been spent in competitive search. So I cut my teeth doing things like selling Viagra online, let’s just put it that way. I grew up over that period and I got involved with a company by the name of CopyPress and I became more of a B2B guy. So I was selling primarily to large agencies and Fortune 500, struck out on my own last summer to build Intellifluence, which is a software as a service. So I’m very familiar with B2B influencers now. But my background was actually in search.

David: Awesome, perfect. Okay, so Joe, I mean we’ll just jump right into the questions that we had for you and hopefully that will be helpful to our audience here.

Joe: Excellent.

David: So maybe we can just start out by talking about a little bit maybe for those that aren’t as familiar with influencer marketing, how you view influencer marketing and then how it is used differently with B2B than B2C companies.

Joe: Sure. So influencer marketing in essence is just having someone tell your story for you. I mean that’s the easiest way to put it. A blogger reviewing a product, an Instagram model showcasing your product, someone on Twitter sharing his or her opinion. That’s all influencer marketing in my book.

The biggest difference that we find between B2B and B2C campaigns is which mediums are going to work best. But that’s actually the case of all campaigns. If the product is enterprise software for example, maybe Pinterest or Instagram isn’t going to be the best. And that’s not to say it wouldn’t be worthwhile, but I’m sure there is some interesting ways to visually highlight all the amazing things that can be done on enterprise software. But the mindset of the casual Instagram or Pinterest user is different than say coming across the exact same content presented in a professional Facebook group, or LinkedIn, or a Twitter chat. So whether it’s B2B or B2C, you’re still having to hit a specific person.

So the marketer first needs to understand who the market is and then based on that market, come up with a buyer persona to build the campaign around.

David: Yeah, that’s absolutely so. So I’m curious Joe, I mean I have been involved in B2C campaigns and it was really easy to go and find – easy is probably the wrong word. But it was more obvious for example, I know Instagram is really huge with influencer marketing, it has been for the last few years with a lot of B2C brands, right?

Joe: Yes, yes.

David: And to me that was always obvious, if you’re in ecommerce, or you’re selling something to consumers, something like fashion or beauty supplies, etc. It was really easy to find people that were self-proclaimed models and they were on Instagram so you could find them and they could for $100 or for $500 or $1,000 depending on how many followers they had, they would wear your stuff or promote it in some ways.

But with a B2B brand, obviously like you said it’s really dependent on the channel – not that B2C isn’t but I think it’s even more important with a B2B brand where a lot of the executives aren’t going to be on Instagram looking at an enterprise level software like you mentioned. But they might be on LinkedIn or on Twitter, so how do companies go about finding those influencers and their verticals for those B2B companies?

Joe: That’s a good question and I’ll actually answer by expanding on that buyer persona and stuff because where to find influencers depends largely upon who the target is. So the easy answer, that everyone listening will probably come to is LinkedIn. I mean we could be honest, it’s fantastic for B2B. If you’re in sales or marketing for B2B, you should have a LinkedIn sales navigator account. It’s one of my most favorite tools because it works really, really well. But that said, if you’re building out a buyer persona, you’re going to be delving into the socio-economic status of a person, the demographics, the varied interests.

So as a hypothetical – let’s say you’re selling accounting services. And for whatever reason you’re previous buyers were fans of college basketball. And I’ll say it’s a potential [inaudible 06:00] because you could be playing for celebrity influence from like Dick Vitale you know, your buyer persona might be someone that you aspire towards for whatever reason. And you know it gets on the television and says this accounting service is the best baby. That is technically influence. But in more realistic terms, since hopefully most of you are not going to buy Dick’s time, you’re going to be targeting pure influencers.

So if you have sales data, you could start to extrapolate using tools like FullContact, just to see what type of social profiles your buyers already have. And from there you’re trying to draw a conclusion to influencers. Are they on Twitter? Are they on Facebook? Are they on LinkedIn? And you can start to look at commonly followed accounts, see what kind of trends there are and progress from those.

It can take a bit of effort but if it’s done correctly, it really does work. I mean you can go and use BuzzSumo, BuzzStream, find a general trend, if you are foregoing LinkedIn, just as an easy and quick solution. You can find a good idea of who is already in your buyers’ network that you can then reach out to. It’s as simple as that.

David: Have you found Joe that the costs are similar for B2Cs as far as compensation that the influencers look for that you reach out to?

Joe: It really depends on the product, right? So there is some B2B and they look for a ton of money because the people that are influencing the decision-makers are chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. That’s of course going to be really expensive. But some of them are really not.

An example that I like to use is an ecommerce B2B CRM system, I can’t name the name of them but they’re able to give their product away for close to free so long as they can get someone to review it and give an honest opinion. Because they’re a subscription-based service. Because at then the costs are basically nothing.

And so they can approach anyone and say look I can’t afford to pay you but if you don’t have a CRM, I’ll give you our CRM. And the uptake on that is pretty significant. So it really does depend.

David: Sure, yeah that makes a lot of sense. Especially where if you’re in the SasS space. If you can give away your product for someone to use for free, I mean that’s been a pretty common tactic for a lot of companies from Salesforce to Google, for a lot of years. So that makes a lot of sense to kind of piggyback off of those methods and use influencers in their circle to just utilize the software and give feedback. Cool.

So in these B2B influencer campaigns, what are – do you have any specific examples that you could share about things that they measured during the campaign of the effectiveness and what are kind of the KPIs that they’re looking at throughout the campaign?

Joe: Okay so I think I have a couple of examples for you. So I’ll use CopyPress because I did work there. I’m still on the board and for the sake of the question I’m referred to as an evangelist. And it comes down to B2B influencers technically are rather commonly referred to as evangelists and advocates.

And so now what do we do? We’re not going to be on Instagram posting pictures of the product and I was not picked for looking pretty because I’m very much not pretty.

David: I know your picture on Skype looks pretty.

Joe: Well he [inaudible 10:02] does it well. But yeah, that’s for ego. By the way with a company like CopyPress can go and reach out to someone like me and give high level sales material, tell me what kind of feature improvements are going to be coming up for not just them but competitors in the future. I’m able to look a little bit smarter by having that support. By sounding a little bit smarter I’m probably helping myself but I’m also in a position to where the KPI is we give stuff to Joe and then we need to get leads. So they keep getting those leads. That’s a bit more of an integrated relationship for B2B influence.

So I’ll go back to that hypothetical – the ecommerce company or rather the CRM subscription company that sells ecommerce. More specifically they tend to sell to people that use Shopify So what they did in the very beginning, they didn’t have any sales data to go off of so they just made a list of a few thousand Shopify stores, looked up owners on like LinkedIn, built an email list really painstakingly, emailed everyone like hey dude, do you use CRMs? A few people I believe responded back and said hey we don’t use any. They said hey why don’t you use ours for free and then share your Shopify direct record?

So their initial KPI was just response. Because they didn’t have anything to go on. The measurement, it was traffic. We got a lot of them after that point. We created a more refined campaign to where they understood that the influence from LinkedIn was so strong, they almost didn’t care who they had so long as they had a pretty decent audience on LinkedIn.

Now it’s to the point where to track is really easy because almost anyone can create a UTM campaign and assign it in Google analytics. So now they reach out to all their influencers, whoever says yes they want to do it and they provide them with a unique URL when posting the review and based on that they know who to go back to in the future for more influence and who to cut.

David: You know one of the – you made me think of another question Joe as you were talking. So a lot of our listeners are a little bit larger in size, you know, medium enterprise level companies. And they might have, you know, some of these influencers they might be reaching out to me might really be some of these higher level executives that might take a little while to get in touch with. Is there any data you can give us on kind of typical response times for some of these harder to reach executives?

Joe: Well for harder to reach executives it’s all over the map. And so what I try to do there is because they’re not going to be motivated nearly as much by money, since they already have a lot of money and they’re using money as a filter, you have to plan with their ego. And so if you’re able to do things in such a way that you sponsor one of their causes – because I’m assuming if you’re in enterprise sales, you have a pretty big budget to play with in terms like wining and dining. So you know, you can sponsor causes, you can go so far as to create an award specifically to give them and just by the function of presenting them the award you’re now hopping back and forth and you get them to respond what you want them to do.

So there’s a lot of the offline ego-bait stuff that goes in there. Response rates can take a very long time. Then at the same time you know a lot of the C levels, they have really good support staff.

So if you’re able to get in front of the right gate-keeper, you’re able to say hey, look, you know we want to present a gym with the enterprise ambassador award, and you know what’s this – it plays itself out pretty well. It goes back to like the link building days for enterprise stuff. People will almost always link back to something where they won an award.

David: No, that’s true. Yeah. That’s a really good point. Cool, that’s awesome. So if someone was new Joe, if they were just getting into influencer marketing, you know let’s say they’re in B2B but haven’t really dabbled in influencer marketing yet. And I know this is kind of a – in some ways this is a dumb question because if something’s working, you want to put all your money into it. But someone that’s new and that’s just testing it out, if you were advising them, how would you advise them to allocate for budget, for testing influencer marketing, like for the next year? Like what percentage of their budget…?

Joe: The quick answer is to just give me their credit card and don’t worry about it. It’s a loaded question. So some considerations have to come back to the costs of giving the product away, like subscription service it’s nominal. You know, it’s a free user, it’s just based on you know, it’s on-boarding and support time. Effectively nothing.

In those cases influencer marketing can be a big chunk of the budget simply because it’s going to push growth faster probably. If there’s a higher dollar amount associated with the client and maybe it’s an industrial part or something, then on a startup like that I want to see the budget shift more towards something like SEO, you have a considerations margin, the higher margin I want to see PPC and influence like actually starting with PPC and then making influence so that you have the immediate sales and then you don’t have to guess as much when you start doing influencer marketing. Because you know who were your buyers actually and you could do that data mining to hit the right influencers.

So those are factors, generally though the lower the cost of goods on a variable basis, the more influencer marketing you want to see. And this is why fashion works so well. It doesn’t cost $50 for – especially cosmetics, it might be like $500, even $2.50, but the low cost plus the high margin means that that company can get away with a ton of products and make up you know, pun intended on volume with that high margin.

So if the startup has a high cost of product, I would shy away initially from doing the typical influencer marketing and instead I’d try to approach it where they’re creating a relationship where they approach these influencers and say hey, let’s do a commission basis. So in that kind of case they would be moving away from traditional influencer marketing, more to sales marketing. But it’s the same goal, it’s just how they go about it.

David: Absolutely. That’s great advice, thanks Joe. So Joe that’s kind of all the questions I had for you today. But and I think this has been really, really helpful. Really great insights and your expertise really shined through. Can you tell us a little bit about Intelliluence, I mean I know it’s a newer company for you, it’s something that is your baby and tell us how we reach you and what you guys do.

Joe: Sure, so Intellifluence is a match maker. What we do is I’m trying to build the largest network of influencers I possibly can. There’s three types of influencers as I define them. There’s aspirational, authoritative and peer. Aspirational just means celebrities. Everyone can figure out how that works.

Authoritative is subject matter experts as influencers. They’re useful for pretty much everyone’s campaign. But what I focused on initially is to create peers. And I did this because I realized most influencer agencies were focusing primarily on big celebrities to do B2C at big companies.

I was like okay, I’ll just do the exact opposite. So I tried to get as many people as I possibly could that were interested in doing reviews and just started matching – and initially yes, most of my clients are going to be small businesses, ecommerce but it shifted pretty quick. As soon as I opened up I was pulling in data from LinkedIn and tracking to see if people had LinkedIn accounts that were also doing regular product reviews. I started to find that we had a pretty nice vein for B2B.

And from there I get used primarily for those situations like I mentioned earlier, a small CRM that specializes in ecom. That sort of system. But my goal is to create the largest network on earth. I will see how long that takes, I don’t know. I think we’re closing in on 15,000 people. We have a long way to go. But it’s exceeded my expectations so far in terms of how well it works for people. Instead of charging 20% like a lot of influencer agencies do, we’re at a very low subscription cost per month with no friction between – so if you came in and you wanted to essentially get blog posts, we don’t really care. If the influencer or the brand agreed to do something, fantastic. We remain agnostic. And that’s been a selling point, that’s worked out really well for us.

David: That’s really cool. And where can people find you Joe? Just at Intellifluence.com?

Joe: Intellifluence.com is the easiest. I am fairly active on Twitter, my handle is a little bit funky. It’s cygnusSEO. I’m pretty much always awake and always working. So you’ll be able to find me on Twitter or somewhere else online.

David: Cool. Well, thanks so much for joining us today Joe, this has been really helpful. And thanks everybody for listening, please rate and subscribe to the podcast.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Marketing Cupcakes, an Enduur podcast. For more great content and to stay up to date on the latest marketing techniques, visit Enduur.com. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and rate the podcast. We’ll catch you next time on Marketing Cupcakes.