Welcome back to stacking growth. 2026 kicks off with our latest B2B marketing roundtable featuring Matt Chinella, Ashley Lewin, and Todd Clouser on LinkedIn influencer marketing. They cover the specific steps to follow when you're planning, launching, and measuring an influencer marketing program from a perspective of a team who's actually gotten it done right. Hope you all enjoy.
Welcome to our January B2B roundtable. We're going to talk influencer marketing for B2B in 2026 to Ashley's point in which you said in LinkedIn, if you saw before, like still very much the early adopter curve, I think, for B2B if you still are thinking about this as part of your B2B promotion program for this year. So with me, I have Ashley Lewin, who's head of marketing at a line and Todd Clouser, Todd your head of content at a line. I actually didn't even ask you for your job site.
Social influencers content. All right. Social influencer content at a line also, and also two refined labs and two of my very, very dear professional friends. So I really appreciate you both coming on and dishing on B2B influencer marketing for 2026.
I'm really excited for you guys to walk through what you guys have done with the line over the last year and some of the trap doors. And I think part of the conversation that we're going to talk through here isn't just like what you guys did, but also like just having more of a discussion around like trade-offs and constraints and like what are some of the decision making things that go into doing an influencer program given like mandates that you have and how you have to line your program around that. I'm really excited to talk through all of those because I think everyone looks at these things as this big, great, happy path. And it's not always like that.
There's always these choices that you make along the way. And I think we're going to dive into that a little bit so people have a pretty full picture of what they're walking into and how they maybe have to think about it. So let's kick it off, man. Okay, so let's talk first why this matters now for B2B.
So influencer marketing has to mature fast, but it's still relatively early. We are seeing and we'll talk about this a little bit when it comes to like content and some and the concept of abnormalities, but like AI is flooded feeds with undifferentiated content. Distribution and credibility now matter more than polish. And I think that's part of the magic of influencer marketing, right?
Is like is the is letting that influencer do their thing. And then brands need repeatable measurable systems and not stunts. So that comes to the consistency part. We're going to touch on all of this in a lot of detail.
Ashley and Todd, I want to give you guys a second to introduce yourselves to the audience. And then I'm going to get right into the agenda and the role. So if you want to take a second to introduce yourself and kind of where you guys fall within the responsibilities of the program, that'll table set, we can get right into it. Ashley, you can go first.
Sounds good. Hi, everyone. Excited to chat here. Please, please put as many questions in the chat as possible.
We wanted this to be a very conversational piece as well. So my name is Ashley and I'm the head of marketing at Aligned. Been here for about a year and really helped build this influencer program up and found the best in the business to run influencer marketing, which is Todd Cloudzer. So I will let him introduce himself.
He's the true magic sauce in our program. So Todd Cloudzer, prior to coming to Aligned, I've been here for about six, seven months now. Prior to coming to Aligned, in between my last job and now I was doing consulting and doing actual influencer, like working as an influencer for different companies. So kind of took a lot of that stuff and kind of brought it into this program.
Cool. All right. Let's go through this agenda real quick and then let's get into it. So there are eight steps because actually it's such a person of frameworks and stuff.
So we had to define it in a neat little package for everyone here. So we have eight steps about going all the way throughout. Won't read them all in full. But really one thing we want you to come away with is there's actually no real, even though this does feel prescriptive, there's no prescriptive way within it to actually do influencer marketing.
You'll have different ways to execute within it, depending on your company, your go-to-market motion, your mandates as a marketing department. I think that's just a key takeaway. And as we go through this, we'll establish that a little bit. But these are the steps and we're going to walk through each of these and we'll start first with the top thing, which is defining your strategy.
And knowing how influencer marketing complements your sales model, how the strategy fits into your offer and the voices you need to create a sound effect then. And actually I want to start with how influencer marketing complements your sales model because a lot of the PLG motion and that definitely impacts a little bit of your approach to influencer marketing. So I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about that here and how that impacts how you approach this when you were starting out. Absolutely.
I feel like the context is really helpful for this because this is going to differ depending on that for you and your company. But we are a Series A, hyper growth startup, we are PLG and sales led to a dual motion. So it's also revenue and also sales revenue that the marketing team is accountable to. And then we also have a really fast sales cycle as well.
We're talking about under 60 days, so really, really quick. And so for us, with this, we had also been testing for a while, dipping our toes into this influencer. It first started out with executive thought leadership and we saw the magic there. And so we saw that trust at scale, especially for our audience.
We are sales tech, we are a digital sales room. And so we are selling to other B2B SaaS companies, especially our particularly in these sales and the CS orgs. And so we know our audience and the sales audience specifically is very heavily on LinkedIn. They like to trust one another.
They're looking for very tactical tips. So I think it's really knowing your audience and where they hang out. I think for a good portion of this conversation today, we'll most likely really lean on LinkedIn for the conversation. But this influencer strategy can go anywhere else.
It depends on where your audience is. Maybe they're heavily on, let's say Instagram or TikTok. Who knows? It could be a ton of different places.
But for this one, we'll be talking about LinkedIn primarily. So for us, our strategy really is kind of like a two-pronged approach. One is that we are needing to drive what we call PLG or product-led growth. So they're signing up for the free version of our product.
So we're trying to drive as many signups as possible. That will either result in that self-serve motion or it will result into our BDRs outreaching and creating pipeline. And then the second one is our brand play. So we want to be the number one digital sales room.
We want to create that brand halo effect in the market as well. So that when someone is ready for a product like ours, they come to align and purchase us. So it's a kind of two-pronged approach. We definitely have you right now on the PLG direct acquisition strategy.
Yeah. I think that's a really interesting part is how you guys kind of fit what you do with the influencer content into that. Because I think a lot of what you have, at least from a standpoint of building it, there's a lot of UTM components to that. There's a lot of through line all the way from that influencer's post to revenue.
We'll get into that detail a little bit more as well. And Todd, I wanted to ask you and I have this cover also in more detail next. But the voices you need to kind of create that sound effect. We were talking about this yesterday was super interesting how you guys have your subject matter experts internally, but then you're also building out sort of this surround sound effect with people who use the product, people who don't use the product, but would be tangentially related to the space.
And so with us, get you guys more exposure. So I'm going to go to the next slide so you can walk through it in more detail. But talk about sourcing talent and sort of what narratives you're trying to build and how that impacts some of the choices you make and who you choose and how you go about approaching though. Yeah.
So if you want to go to the next slide. Yeah. So basically this kind of this is who you reach out to and you're going to start with is going to be determined by what your goals are, what your strategy is. Ashley just mentioned that we are trying to drive PLG signups on one side.
And we're also trying to kind of build this brand awareness halo effect like whatever you want to call it on the other side. So we have multiple goals that we're trying to achieve. And that's kind of why we break it down this way. So like if you look at this matrix, if you want to call it that the way where I would start is if you're not creating any internal content, I think you need to look at internal people as influencers as well.
Like a lot of times when we think influencers, we automatically think like, hey, pay people who already have an audience to get my word out. And that's great. A lot of times influencers are also a really good way to help build your internal influencer creator, whatever you want to call it program, doing collaborations to help build your internal people's audience and thought leadership, all that kind of stuff. So typically if you don't already have internal people creating content, I think that's the best place to start, figure out what's working, what's not there.
And then you can scale it to external people. From the PLG side of the motion, like for us internally, we break this down into like executives for us as frontline sellers, but basically like whoever you're the person using your product, your main ICP for us, that's frontline sellers. So when we look at the PLG side of the program, we're looking for people who can tell stories how they use the product, educate the market with frameworks and templates and that sort of thing and then share links for other people to be able to get that. So you kind of have to figure out what your goal is on the other end of the spectrum, similar to like refine labs, you know, you have your top down narrative executive thought leaders.
So if you're trying to kind of push your narrative more so than push PLG signups, like that's a way that you can go in order to do that. And then we also use what I call bottom up evangelism. We approach it in an entertainment way. So like people like if people are familiar with like Tom Boston, Will Aiken, people that create entertaining content that we can insert our narrative into.
Again, that's a way to build that halo effect. So like if you look at the left side of this matrix, that's kind of our brand awareness people. So they're talking about the narrative, they're inserting narrative into entertainment. And then if you look at the right side, typically this is like very straightforward education where we can educate people on these processes and then insert the product into it.
So that's kind of like the matrix of the different types of people we typically look for. Yeah. I thought what was interesting when we talked about it yesterday was you identifying power users within your own within aligns own users. And sometimes that on earths people who don't have big follower accounts, but tell really good stories about how they use your products for themselves.
Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I thought you had some really, really good use cases that came up when you were that and how that can be a starting point for people who maybe aren't content connoisseurs and don't necessarily know like, well, how do I look for talent, but it's when it's sitting there probably within your own own product users? Yeah. And that's partially why if you look at this, those frontline thought leaders are kind of like the big majority in this group is because if you don't know exactly where to start or who to start with, your power users are a really good spot.
Typically like what I did when I first came to align, I dove into the user data to figure out who was a power user of the product. And then I'd stack rank them and then go out on LinkedIn and see if any of those people were actually creating content. Now, most of them are not what I would call like an influencer, but the beauty is they know all about the product, they have stories about how they use it. And typically because they're not a quote unquote influencer, you can extract those posts significantly cheaper than someone who has a massive following and is used to working on these influencer campaigns.
So you can go to these people, you can ask for these stories, figure out how they want to talk about the product, knowing that it's probably not going to do super high numbers organically, but you do it knowing that you can promote it through, we do it through thought leadership ads. So I actually can talk more about on that, but like the whole goal of using these power users is not for like massive organic growth. It's for extracting these really good personal stories and how to use the product and then paying to get it in front of the right people. Yeah, I think I probably missed in our strategy as well, is we look at the influencer program is also a creative flywheel for our LinkedIn ads as well.
I would say it's somewhere around 90% of our LinkedIn ads budget right now is going towards thought leadership ads. They are outperforming in many different ways compared to other format types for us. It still blows my mind that we will have these like, like we're almost hitting character limit posts and then it's like a subtle PS like try it for free. Those are driving a ton of signups.
And so especially with these power users, like Todd said, they are telling it in such a compelling way where it makes it sound like absolutely like this seems like a must have in your tool belt. I need this that you have that trust that deep understanding of it that it makes it perform even better. So that's a huge piece of it is, you know, we're not just stopping at the organic side of it, but we're also taking it through to paid as well. So even if they don't have that high follower count, you're still creating that content.
Yeah. And you talked about, you just talked about the distribution aspect and Todd, you brought up a quietly brought up a point about budgeting as well, because you know, you have budget to pay influencers just like you have budget to distribute the content and we'll get into that in a little bit because it's actually an important point because they're, they're to become, they're does become trade off with that a little bit depending on if you want to try to go get more popular influencer or someone who demands a little bit more for a post, how that can take away from your ad budget sometimes in order to distribute that on the backend. Let's talk about pre-work here, because I think that this is, this is the not sexy part of the work that actually makes sure that what you do gets the end result that you desire and the two big things, it's paperwork, everyone, but it's contracts and it's the brief. And so I want you guys to talk through each of these because I think this is like, this is that work that makes all the shiny stuff that happens on social media actually happen repeatedly and compound for you over time.
So go through this. I'm also curious, Todd, I know you've done this on both ends of the spectrum. Please talk through any of the good or not so good experiences and the traps you can fall into in maybe over engineering or doing overkill on some parts of this. Yeah, so on the contract side, it basically anybody that we work with, it's a three month trial contract, one post per month.
I think the mistakes that a lot of people make is they try to do like one off post with people. It doesn't work. And then, you know, it's like an influencer marketing doesn't work or this particular person isn't creating content that works for us. When you're, I mean, I don't think this is groundbreaking to anybody, but like when you're dealing with organic content, you have to have, you know, a little bit broader view than just a single post.
And a lot of that stuff compounds over time. One start people, once people start kind of associating influencers with you. So there's a compounding effect. So minimum for us is three months to start.
Once that three months is up, we typically will evaluate that and see if we want to extend it. Sometimes we'll just do another three months and see how that goes. If that first three months does really well, the goal is to extend that to a six month contract moving forward. And the reason being is with most influencers, if you give them a longer contract or if you give them more posts per month or both, there's price breaks per post and all those things.
So more post per month or longer contract, you're going to get, you're going to pay less for the post. So that's kind of how we approach the sustained commitment incentives. So long term commitments can be good and bad. A lot of times influencers will be, you know, gung ho in the beginning.
They're putting all their effort into it. It's new, all those sorts of things and it works well. And then, you know, it starts to become just a check off type of thing like, oh, I create this post, you know, get a thousand bucks or whatever, you know, so we try to incentivize people to talk about the product, like even outside of the post, continue to create the best possible content that they can. And the way that we do that is one, basically anybody who posts for us has the incentive that if they create 50 PLG signups, they get a bonus.
So in that bonus is for the length of the contract. So it's not for like that individual post. If they get 50 signups within like the three months that they're under contract, they will get their bonus of PLG signups. The other thing that we do is we give a percentage of any ARR that they generate directly from their UTM link.
They also get a percentage of that. And then I think what's probably the best incentive for a creator, specifically if this is like a true influencer and not just a power user who's not like actively trying to build their, their audience is we look at how well each individual post does. And then if it hits a certain mark that we feel it's worth putting thought leadership ads behind, we pay to make sure that they're getting in front of the our shared audience. So it's the people they're trying to attract as well.
That's how we approach incentivizing people to always create their best content. And then the review cycle also goes into that. If you're running an influencer program, I think one of the most important parts of ensuring that that content is really good is building a relationship with that person. I've done this multiple ways.
Good and bad. The best influencers that I work with typically we will meet on a pretty regular basis usually once a month or if it's not once a month. We're talking about multiple posts within within one meeting, but we ideate together. We figure out like what we want to talk about, how we're going to talk about it.
And then once they deliver a draft, we have a base for like what that review cycle is going to look like. So nothing's coming out of left field. Typically where we run into trouble and where most I would say like influencer managers run into trouble is when everything just there's there's no communication and everything happens once the draft is delivered. That's typically what and especially if you're not meeting with that person, if everything's happening within like a comment on a Google Doc, I can tell you this from personal experience creating content and managing other people creating content.
Most influencers are like very attached to what they create. So if you have no relationship with a person and then you just come in on the back end and tell them you need to change this. This doesn't sound good like dropping all your comments in a Google Doc. Typically it's not the best experience for your person.
So I think the biggest part of the review cycle is building a foundation for that. Yeah, you talk about having empathy for both sides of the relationship and it's a flywheel both ways, right? Because you're trying to create a flywheel for your business with this. But you're also trying to help them create a flywheel, right?
Because if they make content that's good enough to promote, you end up putting paid distribution behind it. They get to reach more people, respectively, that they would want to follow them. That only happens really when you keep that relationship healthy. It's more in face to face meeting, it's understanding them and what makes them tick and what makes them energized about making good content for you, right?
So you're doing a lot of cultivating, especially when you're starting off that would imagine, right? Yeah, I will say the other thing when you're in this kind of like early contract stage, one thing that we do with every new influencer, whether they're a power user or someone who's never used the product, we always do an onboarding with them. So a salesperson will join me on a call with the influencer. They'll go through like a full demo of the product, answer any questions.
They'll typically hop off and then we'll talk about content and things like that. But again, I think that's super important to actually get on a call, make sure they know every part of the product because we've also had, actually could probably talk to this, but we've also had people that were users of the product that just didn't understand there was, they were only using 10% of it. So anything that actually I can go into outreach because I thought there was some interesting things and things that I thought that were true that were not. Yeah, one thing I'll add onto this, one of the bigger mistakes that I personally made with this program before talking about board is I was afraid to edit.
And so I think that there's this delicate balance to it. My thought process as someone who's also been on the other side is they have worked so hard to build this following, they know what they're doing, etc. And so I was almost two hands off on it. So I think it is a very delicate dance to try and figure out, especially when you approach it in the right way and having that empathy, we were able to work with a couple of influencers just on strengthening hooks.
We talk about hooks all the time. I think that's just part of the game with influencer marketing. And so we were able to help one of our influencers, I think compared to his previous post where we didn't have a heavy hand in editing, his reach doubled. So not only is it, yeah.
And so if you do have that background or have someone with a background of how to write really good content and you know what really lands, you can also be beneficial for them. And you just have to approach it in the right way. That's definitely a big lesson that I had personally is I went too far, one way, instead of finding that happy medium. Yeah, they could try to be really iron sharpens iron, I guess, in that regard, right?
You want to help sharpen their content and they want to sharpen the output that you get for yourself. Like how effective that influencer content is for you. I want to talk outreach because this is actually kind of the awkward part of it, I think, for people who don't do this all the time. Because even one of my notes in this was like, hey, don't don't use your social capital or use it wisely.
No, no, use your social capital to your full advantage. Okay. Like what are you talking about? So when we did this pre-work, I thought that was a funny assumption I had that taught quickly swatched for me.
So I think the other, so there's two things of this that I really want to touch on, which was that aspect of it, knowing your budget for content. And then one thing that you guys said yesterday that I was just totally ignorant about was the creator-agent relationship and how that's kind of a thing. And then the kind of using the inside source, you can get a little bit into that relationship with Vin on that as well. So I'll let you guys kind of choose your own adventure on this for what you want to double tap on, but go for it.
Yeah. So as far as like outreach goes, I have, so I started doing this years ago when I was on the influencer side and we were, we were a YouTube channel looking for sponsors. So I would always go out and send Instagram DMs to, you know, different companies that we wanted to work with. So when I came into managing influencers, it was kind of the same approach because I knew that's what worked for me.
Over email, over anything, just social outreach is typically the best way to handle these things. So when I started doing outreach with influencers, that was just kind of the natural way. And I've never, this is kind of what we were talking about yesterday. I've never met anybody.
It's very different from sales outreach where people can, you know, react different ways. I've never experienced anyone where I was like, Hey, I'm looking for people to post and I'll give you, you know, X amount of dollars to do it. I've never had someone come back and, you know, like get upset about it or whatever. So yeah, I, I, there's never been an instance where I hesitated from sending a DM.
That being said, we also work with an agency that handles a lot of the logistical stuff for us. So we work with an agency called Creator Buzz. Venmetano was a previous seller. So even within the B2B sales space, he has a ton of connections.
So in that instance, if there's a seller that I want to work with that I don't really have a great connection with, we hand it right off to Ven. And the other thing is when you work with an agency like this, because they work with a lot of these influencers at other companies as well, they can kind of give you an idea of what these people are going to charge before you even have a conversation with them. So we get the added benefit of working with, with Creator Buzz, which is the agency of kind of knowing what we're walking into before we do it. Okay.
So the question started rolling in as soon as we talked about how much do we pay influencers? So let's pause and double tap on this because that this came up yesterday also. And that inside source really helps because they sort of have an idea of how much these people charge, propose what price breaks might look like, et cetera. But even still with that, depending on whether going all the way back to sourcing your talent and whether you use a power user who doesn't have great following or you decide you want to go after someone who has big following and has certain titles or works for certain companies, the price of the content can change.
So talk a little bit about what's, what's talking ranges, I think would be the fairest thing to do for like, how much should I be budgeting depending on maybe how many influencers do I want to use? And then I do, Gabriel asked the question also that I want to bring up because we're doing this with the PLG motion of mine and she mentioned the sales line motion and I don't want to discount that question because not everyone has a PLG. But let's start with the budget question first because obviously that jumps in interest. Actually, you mind if we start with the sales line motion first?
Yeah, yeah. That's fine. I think honestly, I think this is, I think this is a pretty simple answer. Gabriela, if you want to get deeper into this, we can.
I think the strategy behind a sales lead motion becomes significantly easier than a PLG because when you're running a sales lead motion, or at least my approach would be when running a sales lead motion, you're indexing hard on that brand awareness halo effect, being the only company people think about when they think about your category, like that sort of program where you're not getting, you're not getting graded per se or your influencer isn't getting graded per se on this individual poster of X amount of sign ups. Right. Because like, that's the most difficult thing to drive. When you're trying to be loud in the market, that's when you get to do the best influencer content because that's where more creativity comes in.
All those sorts of things where you're not trying to push directly to a link. So that's the direction I would go if I was going sales lead 100%. Cool. Well, we're going to touch on that a little bit more, especially we're going to get into measuring success and constraints.
And I think it's a really important topic to talk about and it's going to help answer that sales line motion question a little bit more. I want to circle back to budget because no one knows what to pay. So what would you tell people in terms of like, how much should I be budgeting just for content creators before I even get into, excuse me, how much I might want to pay extra to distribute things that are good? Yeah.
Honestly, there's no, there's no like real right or wrong here. When I first started doing this, I tried to like come up with a way to like figure out what we should pay like people. And really at the end of the day, it comes down to what the influencer is going to charge. And again, that's why I reach out to all these people.
That's why I don't like send in the initial outreach. I'm never like, Hey, we're paying influencers $800 for a post and we think you could be a great fit. Like I never start with that. Never start with your offer, like your price or how about you want to pay it's more like, are you interested in it in the first place?
Yeah, exactly. We're looking for influencers. Here's the, here's kind of like the group of people and the topics we're speaking about think could be a good fit. If you are interested, like obviously on the, on the DM, you just gauge interest.
Then you get on a zoom call and you say, what do you charge? And nine times out of 10, they don't know what to charge themselves unless they're doing it. So it's usually a conversation like, well, you know, I'm looking for something between this and that. And that's when you can say like, okay, well, here's the incentives we have.
Here's what we typically pay for someone of your size. And you figure out all those things internally based on your budget, not based on how many followers they have, what their normal reach is. They'll tell you the range that they typically, you know, float in. And then you can, you can kind of figure it out from there.
Obviously there's massive difference between people. You might have two people with the same number of followers who get about the same reach. And one will ask for a thousand, one more, one will ask for 5,000. So it's, it all comes down to like, you know, why you want to work with that specific person, how, how good of an audience do they actually have that aligns to you?
Like, what are the conversations they're actually having? If you go and you look at like an influencer's comment section, are they actually like, not just engaging, but like meaningfully engaging with the people in their, in their, in their comments, typically that can tell you like, okay, how much, how, how like die hard is there, is there fan base? So like all these things kind of come into play. There's not like a, if you have 10,000 followers, I'm going to give you $1,000 opposed or whatever.
It's, it's really on a case by case basis. Okay. So is there, is there any framework get to get to a fail? I want to answer because Chris, I see this question from Chris and he had a comment as well about it.
Is there any framework that you would exercise towards getting a fair compensation package? Are you really approaching on a case by case basis? Or is it more about like, Hey, you know, I have a resource here in the case of Ben, where it's like, he'll give me a framework is he'll, because he'll have a bunch of comps for me. Yeah.
So I can give you some ballparks. Typically, if it's like a, if it's a, like a power user who's not, who's not like a true influencer, I'll go to them and I'll say like, Hey, typically people who aren't like influencers, we, we start around like 500 bucks, nine times out of 10. People are thrilled with that. We tell them like, Hey, we're going to, you know, if the post does well, we're going to, we're going to boost it and that way you can help you build your audience.
Like nine times out of 10 for those, for that group of people, that's like music to their ears. When you get into like a true influencer, there's a couple of different things like video creators are typically going to charge you more than a text image based text image. But I kind of cut myself off there because even before you get into format, you got to, you got to look at like the level of their position. So typically like executive leadership is going to charge you significantly more than like a frontline person.
Hey, or something like that. Yeah. So like in our situation, like if we have a director of sales, they're automatically going to charge more than an AE just because of how to view their time, how much time that sort of thing. So personally, you got to, that's what you have to take into account first, then you got to look at format.
So typically video is going to charge more than text or image in high experience. If it's creative video, like skits or I don't know, you want to have a song written or something, like typically the more creative video is going to cost more than if I were to like do a lume style video where I'm showing you a process, right? Like a spotlight video of some kind where like you have the product UI on it and you're walking, you're kind of doing a guided demo almost. Yeah.
And just because of the typically the hours that go behind into creating that sort of thing, sure, there's a lot of sketching that goes into that, I would imagine just more. And so just to just answer the question, so I want to make sure we cover the other aspects. Like what's the upper range of something like that? Just just a ballpark for anyone interested in looking at that as a component.
I would say for the average creator who is not like represented ballpark is around like $1,500 if you want to go if you want text cheaper than that. It's like frontline people when you get into executive leadership. I mean, I would say at the very least double it. Okay.
All right. I think the biggest thing here and I know it's probably wanting a framework of like, okay, this is just a neat template actually. We want, we want new templates, right? We're marketers.
We ache for it. Hey, as someone who loves to do it, I get it. But I just want to like really, you know, I hate to see double tap, but double tap on Todd here. It is just so, it's just so hit or miss and I think you have to do the outreach and I would ask them what they charge of.
It's going to cost X or I usually charge X, make sure you have a budget in place. Maybe you have a 10k budget. You're going to need to figure out, I want to make that budget go further. I want this for thought leadership ads.
Okay. We're going for micro influencers, which is what Todd, I would say maybe like 10,000 followers are below and like low to medium engagement roughly, or I want someone that's just super well known in the space. They can really build trust. I'm going to go for someone that's really expensive and that's going to be someone who's more of a senior leader.
They can be charging $5,000 for posts that's not out of line at all either. There's just so many dependencies on it because follower count is not the end all be all. You need to look at that engagement rate. You need to look at their level of depth in the content too.
They could just be really good at getting reach and engagement, but there's no depth to the content. You really just have to use your best judgment and I would say just reach out to the creators and get that part from them once you know your budget. Yeah. Let's talk managing engagement.
We can do this briefly because I think we talked about this kind of in fits and starts, but I think the one thing to identify here is the ad normality is part of it because we talked about this when we were doing prep yesterday just AI generated thought leadership content and even more so AI engagement like bot engagement as well. There's like a smell test aspect right for the content and whether it's AI generated Todd. If you don't mind talking through a little bit of that because that's definitely a risk that you can run into depending on who it is and maybe they're feeling pressure or because they want to do something good and maybe not feeling as confident. So you have to be mindful of this a little bit as you're evaluating right?
Yeah. I think as you bring on more creators, you start to see what good looks like. You start to realize like, okay, these things start to work. Other things aren't working.
When you're in this trial phase with people, you have to go through their comments, how they're engaging with people because if you're just looking at this on a numbers basis, a lot of people gain this and we run into this where influencers will, and honestly, I don't really care if they use AI to help create their content, but with AI now, there's a lot of ways that you can kind of gain the metrics. So we're always looking at these posts, how they're engaging in the comments, who the comments are coming from, are they actual meaningful comments? Because there's a lot of just AI slop that can make the content look like it's performing significantly better than it is. Or even engagement pods, which is still going to be a thing and you see the same people engaging with it.
It can also sometimes be about. Yeah, but even if, I mean, again, not the biggest fan of engagement pods, but even if I see engagement pods happening, typically, at the very least, the idea is that that brings in other real people. So again, if there's real conversations happening in the comments, that's basically what I'm looking for. Yeah.
And there's a smell test at the end of the day, right? Like you're looking at it and going, okay, this looks good. This is where your human judgment really comes into play and Todd, you being the connoisseur of content that you are, I guess you kind of just kind of specially or especially quick ID what it looks like. One thing I also want to touch on here real quick is making sure that your person who's especially going to do something that's a use case or like walk through the product that they're well prepared.
We touch on a little bit, having them get sales training or go through a guided presentation. There's also reviewing the content before it goes live. And then also you guys add them to your Slack channel, right, to help them build fluency or help them see new things, anything, anything else to double tap on there or detail more. Yeah.
In the onboarding process, like we don't do unless there's like a very specific campaign that we're doing one month, we don't give briefs for like specific month specific pieces of content. The brief that we kind of have is more of like an onboarding document. So it'll give like examples of what has performed well in the past, different ways you can talk about specific topics like messaging around the product, like all those sorts of things. So they have that if they need it.
But again, like this all comes into like the month to month conversations that are happening. Gotcha. All right. Let's talk a little bit real quick here.
I mean, actually you can talk about the flywheel here because this is really where that comes into play is this activation process, right? So you briefly meet them, let them cook just means like, you know, you have a little bit of a feedback intervention process, but you largely want them to be creators at the end of the day with the guardrails that you put in place, having that editing cadence goes back to just being being willing to give them feedback, but not to the point where they're not as willing to like participate or make their best content for you. And then give an organic that time and then promoting via thought leadership. And you guys have an editing cadence that you look at when you want to promote thought leadership.
We've talked about this in private. I think it'd be interesting thing to share for the group here if you're willing to. Yeah, absolutely. So after they post, we have them send the link of their posts.
And so we can activate it internally too. So we can send it to our team to, you know, if they know someone who would like the content they can send it to them, whatever it can look like that first hour. Once you post is the most critical for the algorithm, it tells the algorithm how well it's going to perform and then how much it should distribute the content. So we really try and help them there and also make sure it's evident for them that, you know, look around for our answer questions, let's make sure that we really get it warmed up.
And then we let it cook for about two weeks is usually our timeframe because the lovely LinkedIn algorithm that's showing us posts from two weeks ago, that's how we kind of gotten to that benchmark because we want to make sure that we can give it an organic breathing room first. And it also helps us from a reporting standpoint. So after that two week window is complete, we then ask for reporting from them of, you know, like, what was your reach? What was your number of engagements, things like that, just so that we can base it for the measurement portion of this.
But then we also evaluate the content to see if it would be a good fit for thought leadership paths. And so I think the mistake that a lot of brands are currently doing is it's so hard right now to get thought leadership content in general, especially organically, that they want to put every single post behind it and give dollars to it when it shouldn't. There's some that's going to work for paid and some that's just that. It's going to work really well for organic and that's fine.
But we evaluate basically what will do well from a paid perspective. We then work with them to edit their UTMs. And so we change it from an organic UTMs to a paid UTM. We don't have a CTA in the link or in the post.
And we don't want it in the comments. We want it directly in the post. I think there's a little bit of a myth out there that it hurts your reach. I go back and forth.
I don't think it really does. But we have them edit the CTA, you know, like try a line for free. Here's the CTA or check it out, whatever the promotion is, since we have them edit and then we go through and then we promote the thought leadership ads. Like I said, we've run roughly 90% of our ad budget currently right now on thought leadership ads.
It does really, really well. We let it cook next to our internal creators as well. So we put it together depending on the audience and which way it goes. Cool.
I talked a little bit about already. We talked about the incentives and kind of how you do it. So I'm going to skip over this. So I want to get into measurement because this is really where it gets into that POG, SLG split.
You guys have goals, right? These brand goals. I want to be the only digital sales room where ICP thinks about and then the demand goal which is driving signups. So I'm curious about what are the KPIs kind of underneath each of these and also just going back to the idea of constraints and trade offs.
You guys are as a group, you know, your main goal is POG signups. So you track that all the way through to close one and that's how you judge the success of this. There's other examples out there of influencer programs where that it's not, you don't have as many constraints like that. You can use influence.
You can use self-reported. You can look at it from a channel level. You guys have a little bit different of a mandate here. And I think that makes your program as stepped as it is, which I think is good because the more rigid in some ways, very good because it can make it so it's very easy to see the through line for yourself.
So talk a little bit about how your approach to measurement here works. I know I ruined it a little bit for you by going over it, but any more detail you want to provide if you're the audience would appreciate it. You want to do this after you want me to? I got to.
Well, you guys own Go for it. I know it's the measurement person. So this is a fun one. I will say, I'll talk about how we do this, but I also want to say it's going to be so dependent on your strategy and your company as well.
So I think you may look at this and think, OK, that's going to be the easiest. I think it might actually be one of the hardest ways to run influencer marketing because there's so many constraints on it. But if your goal is, you know, we want to be, we want to reach a certain audience. I know that there's been very notable brands out there that have talked about this on LinkedIn that run heavy influencer programs where they want their influencers to reach a certain ABM list, like a countless, and they measure it that way.
It could be that you want to measure it against CPMs. And so you could measure your CPM of what you're paying the influencer against how many impressions they got is that cheaper from a brand play versus your paid motion as well. So we look at brand. That's one way we do that, especially those entertainers that we have on board.
We look at it from a brand perspective. Is it cheaper to reach our audience with them than it is a traditional banner ad that could be a way you look at it. We also look at it from purely how many signups they drove and we have a very thorough UTM process that passes from our products back into our HubSpot instance. And so we're able to look at that.
So if you're looking at it also, when you go back to that matrix that Todd showed, it could be different measurement for each one. So the Braggle, where how did you call it Todd? I'm blanking on it. The video creators, entertainers.
Yes, the entertainers would be like evangelism. Yeah, and that would be your CPMs. And then you're also looking at that. And then also then if you're a demand one, which is your frontline sellers for us, that's the PLG signups.
I would also argue that there's so many ways and I feel like we're fine lapses on a fabulous job over the years talking about this, of how to measure it. You need to look at it from a quality perspective. Look at if you are able to have self-reported attribution, look at the self-reported attribution, things like that. Ours is a little tricky, a little bit of a shocker, but we don't have complete open self-reported attribution.
It's a pick-less and we have LinkedIn as one, but we also have a very heavy paid and executive thought leadership program that if we were to just look at it that way, it would be skewed. So I think it just truly depends on what your measurement system is and what your goal is. And if it's at Braggle, great, looking at it from an engagement rate, looking at it from a reach perspective of CPM perspective. If it's a demand then capture for us, that's kind of the bulk of it.
Then we're looking at it from a cost per site perspective. Right. And Todd, we talked about how the ramp being a real thing, right? And that goes back to that relationship and maybe the first few months aren't great, but there's this compounding effect because you guys have had this play out where you did a post-sale survey, right for a client, and you found out it was a thought leader ad you guys did a year ago, which is how that person and he still remembers you.
So I talk a little bit about that ramp period and how it's not always going to be something that just shows up through one or two sales cycles, which is definitely the case in that example. Yeah, and I think this is definitely the case specifically when you're talking about these entertainers or the people that are not directly driving PLG signups. The longer they create content for you, the more people start to associate them with your company. So, it's one of those things where it's a long-term play versus the try to generate attribution off of one post.
And you start to see those things showing up in sales calls. I know some people who will track mentions in gong calls. That's one way you can do it. But even some of the entertainers that we have that I've talked to in the onboarding process, other companies that they work for, they're getting people reaching out to them and DM's, asking them about that product.
So, I mean, the longer you do it, and again, that's why you want these long-term relationships and not one off post, but the longer you do this type of program with influencers, there's a compounding effect to it. For sure. All right. If anyone has any questions, I want to give people a chance to raise their hand and ask, I know we only have a minute or so left.
I didn't think we would cover it quite like that. And if they're already please come up and volunteer. If not though, I do think there's one other aspect, which is we talked about the KPIs driving the behavior that you get out of your influencer. So, I think it's an important point on to itself.
It goes back to that sales-led motion question that we got earlier. And if your goal is not mandated on direct response or direct attribution all the way through, the behaviors that you're trying to force or create, I should say, are different. And I think some of the risks or your tolerance for risk also changes a little bit too, doesn't it? Yeah, for sure.
I mean, you can tell, even if you look at a lot of our creators, you can tell who falls where on that matrix, even though most people, well, everybody will put a link in there. You can tell who we're measuring what way, just by the content that's being created. Yeah, absolutely. All right, guys, we hit an hour clean.
So I appreciate it. Had so much. If you guys have any questions after the fact, if you think of any, feel free to drop them to us. This recording will go out.
It'll also be part of our podcast and we'll take the deck out as well. And I'm sure we'll get lots of great clips because, Tom and Ashley, just thank you guys so much for coming in and just dropping all that wonderful knowledge. I think this was a really good conversation about trade-offs and execution and just how to actually make this work for you. I think the compounding effects, it not being went off, how to look at organic versus paid when you do this.
These are super important aspects that people don't think about fully when they're evaluating or creating this program for themselves. So I hope that there's people come back and read this and think of all of that, all the nuggets that you have here for creating a program for yourself and how you can make it scalable instead of just, you know, what it can be for companies, which is kind of a random act of approach and so appreciate you guys walking through that in such great detail. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody.
Thank you. Alright guys, I'm Sean, East Coast. I hope you don't get snowed in this weekend or maybe I hope you do depending on how you're feeling but have a great rest of your week and I will see you on the next roundtable. Appreciate you all's time.
Thank you.