Hey everybody, welcome to Stacking Growth Live. My name is Tori Kinlick. I am one of the VPs of demand at Refine Labs. Joined today by my colleague Victoria, as well as a couple of special guests here from the Centerline team.
So Victoria, I wanna give a quick hello and then I'll introduce our guests. Yeah, sure thing, great to be here, Victoria Seiko. Leaving lots of different thinking here at Refine Labs around our growth strategy in general, but you've heard us start to talk about new directions we're taking, new products we're offering. So I'm excited to chat through today how we think about brand growth and brand strategy in light of any offering you might be bringing to market, but with some timely, I won't call in front because it sounds fleeting, but some timely strategies for activating it and winning with your market.
Awesome, love it. And Greg, Fabian, you want to give a quick hello? I'll give a little bit of a spiel after you say, hi and introduce yourselves about, you know, about Centerline. You can certainly fill in any of the gaps that I might miss there, but yeah, you wanna give a quick hello to the audience here?
Sure, thanks for having us. My name is Greg Harbinson. I'm from Centerline Digital on the VP of Strategy and Marketing. And I'm joined by Fabian.
Hey, Fabian Marquez, Senior Strategic Creative Director at Centerline. Thank you for having us. Awesome. So here's the deal.
We want to continue to bring you all, of course, you know, new ideas, new concepts, methodologies, anything that impacts, you know, demand generation, demand creation, demand capture, all the things that you know, refine labs for. But at the same time, we also wanna bring fresh perspectives. So we've got some like-minded friends with us here from Centerline Digital. Greg and Fabian already introduced themselves.
Those are our special guests today. And the backstory here is, I actually worked with Greg, worked with the Centerline team years back in a past life. I do know that they kind of, you know, let's just say look at the world through a similar lens that we're fine labs does. But also have drastically different experiences in terms of just the customers that they work with, kind of much more focused on like the enterprise space, B2B tech, whereas we're fine labs, you know, we're really working with a whole lot of startup scaleups and mid-market companies in the B2B SaaS space.
And so the thought here, right, is that we're gonna get some different perspectives on some topics that we believe you all will find interesting. And Greg is gonna walk us through a little bit of the content today and yeah, we'll certainly kind of try to make this into a open dialogue. And with that, of course, we want to pull you all, that decided to join us live, take an hour out of your day into the conversation as well. So the chat is open.
We will do our best to feel some of the questions as they come in, but you know, send them across. If we can't pull them directly into the conversation, we'll see if we can, you know, at least compile a few that we can address towards the end of the presentation here. But as always, we definitely want to make this interactive with everyone that's joining and don't want to just be kind of, you know, talking at you all. So with that, Greg, I will turn it over to you to jump into some of the content that you all have prepared for today.
All right, thank you. So we are, like I mentioned, we work a lot in content marketing campaigns. Fabian and I will kind of provide some different perspectives on the creative and strategy side of things, as well as the Refine Labs team. Really what we want to talk about today is brand engagement.
So brand engagement is something that no one would really challenge is important for us to start to create. We know that we be buying processes or increasingly happening online. People are doing a lot more of the research and experience themselves trying to consume that content in more of an on-demand format. If we think about kind of what brand engagement means for a brand, it's the attachments that are either emotional or rational that a brand would form between the buyer and its identity.
That's how we get to brand loyalty. So what we think about brand engagement as something that might be the objective with the way that we're going to market, creating the content, we wanted to talk about some of the ways that we're seeing market leaders start to create that loyalty through those repeat engagements with their audiences. So we're kind of collecting that into five areas which we'll kind of explore with the group through some banter. We'll talk about things like authenticity and content, account-based experiences, influence or engagement, things that feel a lot more probably familiar and things that you've probably seen more of in the market.
But we'll also get to some more bleeding edge topics, stuff that maybe traditionally you would think of only the biggest B2C companies with the biggest marketing budgets executing on. I think it's really helping to be aware of where those companies are so that we can be aware of how they are starting to shape the expectations of our B2B audience. While we may not try to go toe to toe with meta, we still need to be aware of what they're setting up, Microsoft's saying. We need to be aware of the experiences that they're starting to have with their customers, which can spill over into B2B buyer expectations.
So we'll go through this piece by piece and then have some back and forth with some different perspectives for you guys. So first and foremost, authenticity and content. Fabian's going to take us through section one and we'll have a little bit of discussion about what authenticity means. Yeah, thank you.
So yeah, with authentic content. So authenticity has definitely become one of these buzzy terms that we've been hearing a lot of these days. So we wanted to be able to first start off by talking about what do we mean when we say authenticity and marketing. And I think in the broad sense, it definitely encompasses things like unvarnished or raw content as opposed to highly polished.
We're talking about customer centricity and messaging and POV. We're talking about being more diverse and inclusive. And we're also probably talking about things like user generated content. And those are broad categorical things.
We'll get into a little bit more of the definition of it in a bit. But I guess it's important to start off with why are we talking about authentic content? Why are we so focused on this idea of authenticity right now? And I think it's because it's important to our audience.
We found out that 88% of consumers say that authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like and support. And notably the value of authenticity is higher than younger your audience gets. So for example, 85% of people between 35 and 55 say that authenticity matters most to them. But that number jumps up to 90% for people under 35.
So it's clearly a very relevant, very important thing for our audience. And it has to do with the ecosystem of how they're consuming content right now, the other things in the market or in their sphere that are happening concurrently or proceeding when they engage with your content. So what are they seeing before and after seeing yours is also informing their perceptions and what they're interested in getting and what they consider to be credible and true. I think it's interesting that 90% of people under 35 sorry to value authenticity, showing an increasing prioritization of what a brand stands for as the younger generations are working their way into the workforce.
It just seems to signal that the old staple of your value proposition having to deal with just your offering isn't good enough anymore. You have to have a good value. You have to have a solid offering. But considering that as table stakes is becoming a dated concept.
Yeah, I think even we talk about creating content with your customers as a way to get this authenticity. But I think you can even kind of ladder it up to the brand level. We know that Gen Z is absolutely kind of, I don't know, impressionable. Maybe it is the word when it comes to brands that actually stand for something.
And even more so when those brands allow their customers, their followers to help them craft what it is that they stand for or if there's some type of event or campaign that they can be a part of. So that there is no questioning how authentic that campaign or that content is because your customers, your followers are a part of it. And so yeah, that definitely kind of tracks to something I've been reading recently just on Gen Z and wanting to be a little bit more involved in the creation or ultimately where these brands kind of settle on their stance in the marketplace or with social issues. So yeah, I think that that's a really interesting data point there though that you do see the number kind of creep up a little bit as you do look at people under that 35 age mark.
And there's a bit of a chasm that we have to overcome too. There's another stat that's not included here, but it reminds me of it. This idea that most of us, 92% of us marketers believe that we're serving up authentic content. But the majority of our audience doesn't.
It's less than, they believe that less than half of brands are actually generating content. So when we're more inclusive and we're incorporating our audience into that, as you just described, then I think we're getting closer to overcoming that chasm as well. I think that the hurdle is figuring out what authenticity means. And obviously that's not a universal concept.
Every person is going to have a value that they hold that maybe isn't universally true. I think figuring out where the, I mean, to speak truthly, maybe where the safe space is for brands and play. When it comes to representing values bigger than just a product, that's been, I would say probably a point of concern and strain as brands try and figure out how they can evolve along with these growing expectations. Yes, I mean, that's a good jumping off point to get into kind of defining a little bit more what it is and what it isn't.
And because authenticity isn't really a one size fits all thing, what's authentic for one brand maybe completely inauthentic for another, we started kind of reverse engineering it by thinking about, okay, well, what is what are we moving away from? What is inauthentic? And doing that, it's a very helpful exercise, I think for all brands, I think categorically, cross the board, you can think about things like not being fake, which might seem very, very blunt, but it's more than just making false claims or being counterfeit, if you will, it's about moving away from overhipping features and benefits. I think we all feel this compulsion is very human to really put your best foot forward and really hype up what you're putting out there.
But ultimately, you can feel really disingenuous and cost you a little bit in brand reputation, affinity, and so on. We're also related to that as this idea of being salesy, laying it on pick, firehose and speeds and feeds, that sort of conversation is a little bit outdated now, that me, me type of conversation. Again, we want to include our audience in the conversation, make them feel not only heard, but they're part of the discourse. And I think that salesiness kind of makes them run the other way.
And then also this idea of being staged or overproduced or too polished. That's the toughest one for me to internalize because I love, I love really well produced videos and stuff and I think there's still clearly a place for that. But yet to be careful of it being inauthentic. In fact, the things that are kind of underproduced these days are really what's striking a chord with audience.
It's a term ugly sells. And I think it does apply when you think about what people are watching on TikTok. It may not be aesthetically beautiful or the most polished thing, but it feels truthful and sincere. I think that's what people are really investing in.
I think what's interesting about this piece, and we think about that last stat with, maybe Gen Z is more discerning on this front than the rest of the generation, or other generations, I guess, is this angle of, you're committing to something, you're making a purchase and we feel this on the B2C environment as much as maybe more so in the B2B environment where you're trying to make a safest bet in terms of the promises or the expectations you have from whatever the product or company is trying to sell you versus what you're going to experience. And when you have an authentic candid, even sometimes building it in public or just kind of transparent conversation around here is the value we're trying to deliver. Whether it's through content that's not pushing our product or it's actually through communications around our product or offering, it feels like you're getting closer to what the actual thing that you're going to be getting in. So it closes that risk factor of great policy presentation sounds too good to be true.
Well, maybe it probably will be. And over the past decades, we've gone from the marketing and corporate side of things to be able to carefully control that narrative. And packing up and position any sort of messaging that they'd like to now everybody's talking about it anyway. So imagine you'll throw yourself into the conversation with transparency, appreciate that people talking about you on G2 or on TikTok or on LinkedIn or just in these communities or speaking transparently about the value you're driving or not.
And so you might as well kind of show up with that same level of transparency and authenticity in your communications. And you hit on an interesting point there. When you talk about generational expectations and these millennials, Gen Z, these are people who grew up with social media being a very prevalent in our lives. First, personally, then professionally.
As these generations have grown into the space, they are used to content that feels a little bit more real-time, a little bit less produced and more, I guess, demonstrative of a consistent, playing a consistent role in a conversation or marketplace. And I think people, people of those generations are just a little bit more skeptical of a brand who can choose very strategic moments to place a very polished piece of content into the conversation, but then not be available for comment or follow up pieces to continue that conversation. I think it's really hard to let go of maybe some of that production value, some of that positioning as the worketer, but that's really the genuineness, the authenticity that are, I think these up-and-coming generations, they don't see it with the same stigma, I think as generations before. Yeah, in the chat, Carol, Mitchell Lynn said, maybe we want to hear a story in a sale.
And I 100% agree, and I think that's definitely a valid tactic to look at. The storytelling when done well, it gets more to the wide and the wet, you know, when you're leading with why, we know that that's always a good thing. And also, you can have a very polished story, if you know, as it were, but the elements that can come through is authentic can be in the voice of it. Who is telling the story?
What voice are you casting for that? Is it a polished voice of our actor? Is it a real person? Is it a customer?
So you can start to get really granular about different layers of authenticity that you can start to land in different assets or campaigns as you go through it. But I 100% agree, and storytelling is great. It's a great approach. Right, and the comments also called out something about audio quality.
I think we've seen actually a quite a few use cases where as long as we had good audio, even if the visual of the video was more quality, we can pull that video and animate over it, or we can use it in a podcast, for example. There's a lot of use cases for that, even if maybe you don't have the ability to put a nice camera on site to build content. Yeah, I love Abby's tip as well. Don't inflate and round up numbers, right?
Don't tell me that over 17 companies are using, say 18, just say 18, no one's gonna care if you want to kind of say ish, right? Just get to the point, be authentic, be truthful. And I think those things kind of come through when the end result of the content that you're putting out there. So as we said before, it's not a one size fits all, kind of approach.
It's really about what's authentic for you, what's authentic for your brand, or that particular campaign or that particular product set. What's essential truthful and credible bit about what you're doing, what you're selling, what you're putting into market, and then how do you strip away all the artifice and look at communicating that authentically? And for us, that comes across in three key categories, and messaging, point of view, and aesthetics. Messaging, it's what you're saying.
As we said before, it's starting with the Y. But it could also be things like embracing imperfections. There's a lot of nuance that can come through in that way. It's gonna be admitting what you don't know, to even using certain vernacular, or even improper grammars, if it suits the purpose or the platform or the channel that you're communicating through.
For example, LinkedIn through versus Instagram. You can have the same campaign with assets going through each particular channel or platform, but what works well in LinkedIn may crash and burn, or at least not do very well on the other. So you can sort of tailor based on platform in addition to audience sometimes. And then with point of view, it's how you're saying it.
It's about your perspective, your attitude, your philosophy. That's the thing that's reflecting your brand voice. And as we said before, with an example of this when you do voiceover, depending on the piece of collateral that you're putting out there, are you getting a smooth, polished sort of voice of God-type talent? Or is it someone scrappy and unpolished?
And somebody may depend on your audience, if you're talking to say a developer audience versus the C-suite audience. So sort of tailoring the execution also to who you're talking to and what they seem to respond best. Again, not in a way that seems mercenary and sort of way too premeditated, but in a way that linguistics or linguists would call code switching. When you're adapting based on what's true to the person, what's true to the listener?
What are they responding to? And lastly, we have elasticity aesthetics. So what it looks and sounds like. Again, this can vary widely based on channel and platform, but aesthetics properly align to the medium and the audience can work wonders.
So if you want to, for example, amplify the voice as partners or you want to do a thought leadership play or sort of harness influencers or experts, audio only assets work great. You don't have to pull out all the stops and do a big produce video. A podcast could be the perfect ideal asset. And podcasts are great because it's more intimate.
You're getting, again, that more unvarnished, unpolished kind of approach. And then if you are making videos, you don't have to feel pressure for it to be the super polished Hollywood production. The more unvarnished sometimes the better. And we've certainly done things in the past where we're even showing in incorporating sort of like behind the scenes shots, seeing the clapboard, for example, as you can see the visual there.
And of course, user generated content, as we talked about earlier, Gen Z and millennials, are audience members who do like to be more involved. They want to participate with brands and be part of the conversation. So empowering them to do that in ways that work for them and work for you can be really effective. Obviously, there's a lot more to talk about when it comes to authenticity.
But one important thing to remember is the broader ecosystem, as we said before, how your audience is consuming content. They're watching raw content on TikTok, they're listening to people bear their souls and podcasts. So these audiences, they don't want to be sold to. They can see it coming a mile away.
And it's an instant turnoff. Especially younger audiences who are really, they're really driving this need for authenticity right now. So they want to know who the brands really are and what they stand for. And in the end, it's all about value.
Audiences place a premium on authenticity. And since they value it, we should too. And when we do that, we do think it will pay dividends. All right, so I know we've got a couple more points to go through here.
I like the authenticity point first, because I feel like a lot of the rest of what we discussed kind of builds on how to represent that authenticity and connect with people on a meaningful level. The next piece that we wanted to talk about was account-based experiences. So creating account-based experiences to help establish that brand connection. So when we think about account-based experiences, personalization is really kind of the core of what comes to mind here.
And personalization is valuable. It's profitable. It can help you lower acquisition costs by half. I think, like maybe I mentioned, there's a gap.
There's a chasm to cover on the authenticity message. There's a chasm here too. 85% of companies feel like they deliver personalized experiences, but only 60% of customers agree with them. I think that's a pretty striking difference to be able to look at and figure out, all right, clearly we are defining personalization differently than our target audiences.
What can we do in order to change our expectations? I think account-based marketing, huge buzz term, very big trend in budget line items over the last several years and continues to grow. Account-based experience, ABX has kind of been encroaching on that space over the recent past. And I think it's an important way of approaching it, with a little bit of a different lens, really to get at maybe one of the core challenges of ABM.
So we talk about ABM, it's all about marketing. Whereas ABX is about the customer. We talk about the work experience. And really, if we're thinking about the difference between those two, ABM tends to revolve around things like list building and targeted outreach.
So we know who we want to reach. We know maybe what content we can use to sell or aligns with our offerings. But we're probably neglecting the intent piece. We're not looking at the signals.
ABX really focuses on the intent piece. So it's not just who and what we send to them. We have to figure out when in order to make sure that we're hitting them at the right point. LinkedIn, the study last summer, they co-led a study where, I think they found that 95% of brands were not in the marketplace for products or services at any given point, which means that only 5% of companies are willing to buy something.
So if we're only going to market with low-functional content, offers things related to buying our services, we're gonna fall on a lot of deaf years. And I think one of the real challenges with that is that we can frustrate people who are not ready to buy, who may be ready to buy from us eventually. So it could be the right type of company, but they're not ready to hear that type of message. We should be giving them a different type of message.
ABX. I'll add to this Greg. I think I'm a big fan of, I guess we can call it an evolution of ABM towards this ABX approach. It never should have been just marketing, right?
It was always about marketing and sales. And to me, that was kind of the beauty of what ABM brought about is it forced that partnership when so many of the conversations previous to that were about the rift between marketing and sales. And so the fact that we're kind of, I don't know, renaming it, rebranding it, whatever you want to call it, to me that's a positive thing, even if it is still a bit of a buzzword. And I think when you boil it all down though, right?
Like there's a couple really common mistakes that we see clients make that we work with that are interested in moving forward with an account-based strategy, we'll call it. I think the first one right is, and this is always my first question whenever I'm speaking with someone that's interested in ABM, ABX, whatever it's. Are you talking about, because it's such a nebulous term, are you talking about a one-to-one campaign or strategy, a one-to-few or one-to-many? And that's often a great starting point to at least kind of get the conversation flowing and ensure that you're on the same page as whether it be your sales counterparts or other marketers you're speaking with, because determining what your audience is going to look like is ultimately going to encourage or suggest what the appropriate tactics and budget and timeframe are going to be.
The other thing that I think I see companies make a mistake of a lot, which is interesting based on the last slide you had up, is they think of it as a tech-first approach, and that can be any further from the truth, right? It's not about the technology. Sure, there's ABM technologies out there that might be able to help you do your job or run your campaigns or measure your effectiveness a little bit better, but it's much more of a mindset approach and kind of a handshake agreement with a sales team as far as like, these are the accounts we're targeting. These are a collection of the tactics that we're both going to be teaming up and executing together.
And these are the ways that we've agreed that we're going to determine success of these efforts, of these investments. And so I think it's great that we're renaming it from account-based marketing to account-based experiences. It does focus much more on the recipient, the audience, the buyer here, which of course is important. But yeah, at the end of the day, I think it's all about, at the start, understanding who you're going after and what success looks like.
And if you have the technology and you can afford the technology, great. But my experience has been oftentimes that when companies are pulling the trigger on purchasing the tech-first, they're putting the cart before the horse, instead it should be much more focused on, what are we trying to get done with these accounts besides just getting them to either purchase something from us or spend more money with us. And getting really prescriptive, along with the tactics, the success criteria that you're working towards. And I think that that's a much more appropriate roadmap than saying, all right, I'm going to go spend $250,000 on this piece of tech.
And I'm going to let this vendor tell me the right way to utilize it and how I'll get the most bang for my buck with that investment. It's, I think, instead, focused on aligning with your sales team and figuring out what's going to matter to these people. And are you pulling the right numbers to really make an impact? I totally agree.
I think it's a common mistake to use software to correct this alignment between departments. While the most sophisticated account-based experience programs involve sophisticated board frustration tools, you can have a much more significant impact if you just get everyone on the same page about who your target prospects are, what the types of challenges they face across their buying journey are, and how you can create targeted messages that address each of those challenges. That's the core of what we go after at ADX. I think everything else on top of that is awesome if you've got the budget to support it.
I might add that it actually also extends, of course, beyond that buying journey to your point around the 95 versus 5% stat. The end goal here is a relationship with an audience. And that might start with, first of all, getting them problem aware of something that you're eventually going to be able to help them with. So when we think about, are you messaging, you're sorry, right at the bottom of the funnel, the product solution that you're able to offer, maybe they're still a few steps back and exploring different products to a solution they're aware of.
Maybe they're not even solution aware yet, let alone problem aware yet. But I think this also goes back to what stage are they and what are their problems or challenges in their actual role where, again, we can default into any level of tools and scraping and analysis, but if you're having a problem, it's the same because at the point we're always making with data content, just because someone downloads a piece of information doesn't mean that they're ready to buy tomorrow. It actually might mean that they're very early and understanding what the heck is this phrase you're even talking about and is it something that relates to them. And that helps you to nurture the relationship over time versus nurture the lead and shove them down this funnel that they just might not be on the accelerator in the timeline you are.
I think that's a great point. And I think as a marketing strategist, I still think about customer journeys as being linear just because that's the flow chart that I map out as I'm thinking through what to create. But there's all kinds of studies about house, sporadic and chaotic that journey actually is people don't start at the beginning and work their way to the end. And it's not just one person with B2B, right?
It's a whole group of people. We have to be aware of it. I love when you use the word relationship. That's when we talk about brand engagement relationship is really what we're trying to create between an entity and a human.
That's how we think about the best practice really. It's kind of thinking about them as people with problems when we want to speak to those problems. All right, number three, building on that a little bit more. Some tactics that we can use to kind of create some of those good experiences.
Third party experts is a huge letter that all too often is forgotten by B2B companies. Before we get too far into it, I want to throw up some stats and show how important influencers and third party experts are for the B2B space. I think before we get too far. And a fun stack here is that the first reporter used to do influencer marketing is actually back in 1765, the Wedgewood China and the Royal Family paired up to do a little bit of influencer marketing to kind of establish some credibility and a little bit more of a desire for their products.
And over the years that we've seen this play evolve and be used in a myriad of different ways. Couple stats that are on the right that really are going for B2B tech. 77% of marketers say that prospective customers are the wide advisory industry experts. So we can go out industry experts thinking about people who are outside of the vendor, someone who can probably speak to them a little bit about possible solutions for the problem, possible vendors who are appropriate for that, maybe past experience.
78% of B2B marketers have increased their social reach with their branded content by working with influencers. So typically the go to is the paid media is how we can expand our reach. But influencers are a really viable pay to play option when we think about increasing our reach. And if we select the right influencers and we think about funding people who have shared values with our brand to kind of go back to that authenticity message, we find people who have already engaged audiences that are represented with the audience we're trying to reach.
We can get in front of our audience side and very targeted by going through a third party. And then lastly, just to kind of talk about influencers versus on paid media. There's a study doing that found B2B brands could achieve 11 times higher ROI with influencers compared to banner ads. I think there's a lot of data about banner blindness on people using ad blockers thinking of those as kind of wasted space.
One more platform is looking to deprioritize those types of formats. Influencers are perceived as being a much more genuine and authentic way of going to market. So still pay to play and it's represented as such. But it's a great way of presenting your value, your voice within the conversation up in a way that's more genuine.
So can I play devil's advocate on a couple of those points there? And maybe not even devil's advocate, just different angles are thinking about this. The first piece on that last that makes me think, we talk about boring and there's a lot of, boring, basic, creative that we're working and our team is doing an amazing job changing the conversation around. But I wonder if part of it is like you see a voice you see a face you see an influencer in a B2B campaign that cuts through a bit better than exactly what you're referencing, kind of the dullness of banner ads.
There's also the piece around almost the extreme of experts or endorsements where you might start to wonder is somebody pushing something for a certain reason or you got to the extreme of G2s or horse or experts or partner experts who are potentially paid to play. So I guess all of that to say there's fine lines here and there's different reasons why things might cut through. And also worth mentioning that third party experts might not be the perfect fit for budget wise or strategy wise for every company out there. So that's it.
That last point in particular is vital. Like there are a lot of stats about how awesome influencer marketing can be, but only if it fits naturally. You can't force this one. So you have to find someone who's values, who's audience, who's natural messaging aligns very cleanly with what you're already trying to communicate.
I think the advantage that B2C marketers have is that that stuff isn't always, it doesn't play the same role. So they can partner with a celebrity influencer, not just a subject matter influencer. And I think that's where these two types of strategies can be a little merged incorrectly. But that last piece you said is completely over.
You can't force this one. I'll back to the authenticity message, right? It has to be real. Otherwise, people are going to see right through it.
There's an example, I want to be upfront. We did not work on this example. I think it's just a great thing that other companies can learn from, but it's SAP, very well known and could be to be world. They operate across many different industries and regions.
They had a challenge that they turned to influencer marketing for. I think this shows some interesting data that help back up why this could be a viable angle compared to pay media, which is also a very viable angle. They had a, they wanted to establish their voice as a more trusted source of information outside the context of buying decisions. So when we go back to creating relationships outside the buying journey, those that 95% of companies who aren't in market, they're just looking for credible experts so they can continue to learn.
They want to establish a voice of themselves. So they have a podcast tech unknown, very reputable. They had been running it, but decided that they wanted to use that as their method of expanding their reach, expanding their voice. They decided that they wanted to run this for two seasons, bringing an influencer host and some outside industry experts, as well as internal executives as guest speakers.
They created some episode landing pages and they ran internal and external promotion. So they had been running this, but then decided that they wanted to bring in those external voices as external influencers and experts to help them benchmark, right? Is it better for each one ourselves or can we level up what we're able to get if we go outside for some expertise? So three big stats here.
And I think the first two show volume, the third one shows quality. So they were able to see 66% of an increase in podcast downloads from the previous season when they involved that influencer and external experts. They had 52 million in potential reach or influencer shares. That's massive.
SAP is massive in and of itself, but they were able to get a 66% growth in downloads season over season. That's volume. That doesn't necessarily show us quality. So when we think about how we evaluate quality there, they were able to see 2,600 page views with over two minutes of time on page.
So if we're starting to figure out, is this volume of referrals that were generating from influencers, right? Is it, is this a channel that we need to consider? Is this an audience that's meaningful for us? How last stat is really powerful?
We're showing that we are reaching people who are receptive to our message. This message is relevant. And now we are creating meaningful connection with them because they're spending some significant part of the content. I think what's interesting too, right, is when we're talking about the results of this influencer strategy, oftentimes these are the same types of results that we're looking for to determine the effectiveness of the content that we produce ourselves, right?
And so yes, I think a lot of times the question is going to be about what's the ROI of this influencer strategy? How do we know if it's working? And you don't have to look very far from the ways that you're currently measuring the efficiency or the effectiveness of the programs or the content that you're producing. You just maybe kind of need to view it under a little bit of a different lens.
And the thing that I think is so great about influencer strategies, I mean, we've seen for the last several years how B2C has been utilizing this. And there's TikTok stars and YouTube stars making millions and millions of dollars right now, just effectively working as an influencer on behalf of brands. But for those of us in B2B that are kind of questioning, is this right for us? Is this appropriate for a B2B setting?
Without a doubt it is, right? Because people are still ultimately the ones that are making decisions. Even if it is as part of a buying committee, it is still people that make up that buying committee, right? And I think the main difference, the difference in mindset, I suppose that you need to consider is that when you're running campaigns, when you're developing ads, you're trying to influence people.
And in this case, you're trying to almost influence the person that influences people. And so trying to get to the source of who has that ability, who is going to effectively help me cut corners, when I need to try to find ways to build trust and affinity and all the things that these influencers already have. How do you go about finding these people? Well, the question just came in through the chat a couple of minutes ago, SparkToro, I think, is a great site that you can plug into, whether it be your website or websites that you know your customers, your audiences are frequenting.
And that's going to kind of spit out a couple of different websites, followers, you know, Reddit accounts that people are often following along. That's a great way to pinpoint who might be an appropriate influencer within your category, within your vertical, that follower wonk is another site. I haven't used it myself, but I've seen it run up a couple times for again, being able to just kind of understand the following, the makeup of the audiences of these influencers. One of the other ways is just, you know, create a short survey and send it out to your customers or even your customer advisory board.
Ask them directly, where are you hearing about, you know, where are you going for advice? You know, where do you go when you need a recommendation on a specific piece of tech to solve a problem? That's, you know, the solution to so many of the things that so many of the challenges that we in marketing are often faced with is just go talk directly to your customers and find out for yourself what the right way, the right content to produce the right influencer to, you know, to go after and they might give you some, some good direction there. And, you know, once you find that person, you know, co-create the content with them.
Don't just put it all on the influencer and think that they're going to be the solution of all your problems. And if you're not paying them, or not paying them yet, make sure it's worth their while, right? You know, help them understand that like the output of this co-created content is something that, you know, you can help cross-promote, get them some new followers, get them new audience. And of course, you know, there's going to be direct benefit in it for you as well, just getting, you know, that trusted source to kind of vet or help establish your product in the eyes of people that follow them and that trust them.
And as you can see here, just by, you know, kind of this SAP case study, there's a lot of different ways that you can figure out how to utilize these voices, these influencers and their followings. And it doesn't have to be a far reach from the things that you're already doing today. It might just be a new voice and a little bit of a new perspective that comes along with a lot of, you know, great value and value added baggage, I guess you could call it as well. Just to kind of bring this home for why influencer marketing or third party experts are valuable for B2B tech.
I think number one, the limiting deprecation of third party cookies means that we are going to get fewer levers that we can pull in order to do targeted advertising, targeted for active outreach. Influencers are going to continue to be a really valuable way for doing that. I think SEO also ranks on that list. You can gain brand equity and crowded markets.
So if you are a growing brand and there is a large incumbent that already has a good reputation, kind of piggybacking off of someone else who has established some equity with your audience is a great way of entering and defending your value in a crowded market. I think that pertains if you're a brand new company or if you're an established company, but you're breaking into a new category. And then lastly, you're able to scale content creation without headcount. This point also pertains to pay media more generally, but you can pay someone else to create content for you.
Like we've seen that mentioned in the chat here. And then that cost is as long as you would like for it to be and then you could cut that off. You control the length of your spend with this, with greater flexibility than if you were to have to take on headcount. And so you've found especially post pandemic, the competition for talent has been unreal.
Some companies are finding that they are unable to compete with usually I use meta as my go to, but with the announcement of the layoffs this week, I think the marketplace is changing it again, but not every small brand can compete with the meta-stendy Amazon's of the world. If you're looking for a way that you can get high quality content created and you're unable to compete for expensive talent, this is another tool that you can add to your toolbox. Awesome. We've got about 10 minutes left right now.
I know we've got two more points to move through here. So just keeping an eye on time, we'll roll through these. All right, so number four, strong brand self-free times more volume than we brands. So we're gonna talk about the value of creating strong brands.
We have mentioned the stat before of 95% of people are in the market. So there's gotta be more to our value than just a product. We've got an established identity, build a relationship. Couple things here, two times BB customers are two times more likely to consider a brand that shares personal value over business value.
So we're looking for ways to differentiate in market places. We need to be about more than just the products and services that we offer. We have to figure out what our value system is that we stand for and represent that. Another important stat here is that Gartner reports, if your brand has a defined purpose and that resonates with your audience, you're guaranteed to outperform the stock market by 120%.
That's pretty significant for growing companies. So especially companies looking to IPO, that's that can really bring it home. But I think it's a true science, but there is monetary value in having a value system that's about more than just the products that you sell. So we can say strong brands, once they say what that is, and this is probably we're gonna have a little bit of banter here.
Strong brands are meaningful. They have more people loyalty to any customer expectations. They are differentiated, but in a positive way. And then they are salient.
So when someone has a need, you come to mind as the solution for that need, you are the brand of choice. I think that's a really probably a word simplified way of thinking about a strong brand, but we start to try to create an identity for ourselves. This is kind of where we approach this. I'm curious if the rest of the team has any other thoughts that end here on strong brands.
This is interesting to me. I actually use the working Kantar. So I've spent a lot of time in the analytics around meaningful difference and, you know, stallions as brands building brands goes. I think there's one comment from my end just thinking about, again, the category level versus the brand level and then your product level.
Because, you know, stallions comes to mind when, as you said, there's a need to stay that the buyer is in and they have their mental availability going towards the brands that have been there for our private conversations around the relationship that I downloaded, a document or a tentative webinar when I was not at all thinking about buying this, but I stayed with the brand or benefited from their content, their information over the last few quarters. And now I'm in a need situation where suddenly their website of mind matters. And then you start to get into the differentiation point where it's not just better, but it's actually different and why is this something I need in a unique way. And then, you know, the relevance to me and it actually, you know, the differentiation access that the brand is anchoring on so that I don't care about because maybe it's not.
And, you know, the circular loop here is the brand needs to do the work to know what matters to the buyer and what those access points are. Not to say that's what you should limit your strategy around because sometimes you need to do the work and tell them why this access point of differentiation matters. Might not be something they've ever thought about before and there's an education required, but that's again, where you get into the category level or very macro level awareness building that you're needing to start with and then you get into, but now why is our brand or solution of choice once you start to get closer to actually needing us as your problem solver, just a topic there. I think, and just kind of underlying like why all this matters, obviously we've got stats around the customers are likely to buy from brands that they trust and that there's increasing revenue when you've got a consistent and engaging presentation of your brand.
But I think there's also the talent side of things, strong brands attract more talented voice, they attract better prospects. That's kind of where I think this all meets the bottom line. The marketplace today is ridiculous, right, competing for new business and for talent. And I think this is usually one of the easier things to ignore, but there is business value of care.
And since there's not a ton of time, we'll talk about the meta-resturve. This is kind of the dumb or bleeding edge area, but we're gonna bring it home for why this is relevant for B2B's ass. Yeah, it's funny, I can definitely see a kind of a red thread connecting from the first topic of authenticity through ABX, especially with the relationships and then the third party experts and of course a strong brand. I think it's funny, because it's all, in a lot of ways we're talking about some very similar things in all four of those categories.
But now for something completely different, something that might feel kind of far future, as Greg said, completing edge, it might actually be a little closer than you think. So I think Metiverse is an interesting, relevant thing to talk about, because as marketers, we are always looking on the horizon of the next trends. And when we started looking at this, we were surprised to learn about the stat 88% of medium-sized businesses are already using their testing, AR on-medded reality for a variety of purposes. And this is everything for product development, retail inventory management, customer engagement, you know, inter office collaboration, training, communication and of course marketing.
So this is significant because AR is considered sort of an underpinning technology of the Metiverse. So when we're talking about the Metiverse, what is it, right? So the first thing you should know, if you're uninitiated, it isn't just one thing or one technology, it's actually a range of technologies. And that includes AR as we mentioned, but also virtual reality, something called mixed reality technologies which are a hybrid blend of physical and virtual worlds.
It's like the internet, it's considered through the future of the internet or the next iteration of the internet. And like it, it's always on in real time. It is designed to be fully immersive. So these are worlds that you can kind of dive into.
Some will be open and some will be linked to one another, while others might be insular and proprietary, like the one that Apple is remember to be building. And it's powered by a fully functioning virtual economy, built on things like cryptocurrency and digital goods and assets and NFTs. Okay, so we might think like Facebook, right? We're meta, but yes, it's like that.
But like a lot of other brands that were doing this before, Facebook became meta and are now part of what's, we're seeing as kind of a gold rush, stampede into the Metiverse. You'll notice on that list on the right, that there's a strong gaming component here. And it's true that the gaming industry is leading the charge. And that's relevant though for all of us because it's driving a lot of major functionality, it's being developed for the Metiverse.
Standing from games is gonna be kind of relevant to all of us. Things like peer-to-peer interactions, financial transactions, user-generated content, world building efforts. All of these are gonna be more heightened, more tangible and more relevant in the Metiverse than they currently are online. And the other thing that's relevant about this is the technology and investments being made.
We know of course about Met has famously investing 10 billion. Epic Games raised 2 billion from Sony and Lego to build their Metiverse. Over 700 million in real world dollars has been spent on virtual real estate. And that includes one person who paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dog's neighbor in this new purse, is proprietary Metiverse.
And you have Nike Gucci, lots of other brands that are plunking down big chunks of significant investments for these platforms. And this is all about investing and building this out in the future. And it is forecast to become a $13 trillion total addressable market by 2030. So what does this matter?
It isn't here yet, so why should we care? And maybe we shouldn't write this very moment. But thanks to the pandemic, adoptions of things like ARV or HasRapidly Ex separated. As have digital currencies, remote work and e-commerce, including as Greg stated earlier, that B2B sales is increasingly happening online.
So the world is becoming more and more virtual. And we're also seeing that brand marketing engagement becoming more consumer-led. McKinsey notes that there's been over 50% increase in influencer marketing in the past five years, which bodes well for the growth and adoption of Metiverse. The last point of this is McKinsey proposes that maybe now's not the time to go whole hog, but it is a good time to adopt a test and learn mindset with the Metiverse, to experiment with technologies.
And so things like events, there's a lot of virtual events happening now, there's a lot of different kinds of engagements and activations that we're talking about, or events that are hybrid or virtual 100%. So these are all things that can help us kind of dip it into the market and start to prepare for what could be an eventual element that dominates a lot of marketing conversations in the near future. I know we're right at our time. I think we've for one, thank you everyone for joining.
I think one of the things that we've tried to kind of pepper through here is that some of these might be being best practices and not everyone's organization can afford to be a best practices organization. I think sometimes good enough has to be good enough. But really I think in all of these points, there are steps that you can be taking. And while you may not make a physical sense of stepping forward with all of them, these are some interesting levers to be pulling as you're thinking about creating better brand engagement, setting up your brand for growth.
We try to be right back by data and stats and things that come down to the bottom line, because that's the only way to be continued to do business as well. So I think as you think about evaluating where the priorities align with your business first and foremost, when we go back to that first point, authenticity, you have to figure out what your identity is, what the value of the brand is, not just the product, but kind of what you're trying to stand for. And then from there, you're able to figure out which of these levers may align very nicely with your values and I think, Victoria, you brought up the point regarding influencers, but it kind of pertains to a lot of these points. It may not be that each of these is appropriate for you based on the values.
You're trying to create identity, you're trying to create for your brand. I think that's a nice place to start. There's obviously a lot of other decisions that have to be made from there regarding prioritization of budget, but you don't get anywhere if you don't have an idea of the identity you're trying to create behind that reintegration. Well said.
Well said. Well, we've reached the end of time here and a couple minutes over. So thank you all for joining today. Thank you for those that have hung with us a couple of extra minutes here.
Y'all know where to find us, Victoria and myself, the rest of the refined labs team, but Greg, Fabian, how can people find you and the centerline team and hear a little bit more about some of the great work y'all are doing. Yeah, we work for centerline digital. We are marketing agency based in Raleigh, but we have people over the states. We are on LinkedIn.
We are on centerline.net is our website. If anyone has any questions or interest here, you're welcome to hit us up and we're happy to answer for the questions from here. You guys have some great stuff going on in the chat throughout. Great.
Well, thank you all and until next time.